Nishanth Selvalingam Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick  Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump, in case you haven�t watched one of these before, is a ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. It’s an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people, and we’ve done over 700 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, look under the interviews menu where you’ll see them organized in several different ways. We’ll be updating the website in the next couple of months so forgive the bland appearance of it. It’s been that way for many years but we’re gonna update it, redesign it. One feature that I like to mention these days is that we have something called the BatGap bot which is an AI chat bot. You can find it under the menu of that name and it produces much better results to spiritual and philosophical questions, then you’re likely to get on ChatGPT or one of the commercial bots. So if you’re into that sort of thing, try it out. It continues to develop as AI continues to develop at light speed. One final little business type point is that this whole program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it. There are PayPal buttons on every page of the website, and there is a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. Okay, my guest today is a very interesting fellow named Nishanth Selvalingam, nicknamed Nish the Fish. And rather than just read his bio, I’m going to do this conversationally and just start asking him questions and let him bring out the points. So, Nish, no one has seen you yet, so you’ll have to do your little namaste one more time once you begin to speak because then the camera will switch over to you.

Nish  Jaima, jaima, namaste Rickji, thank you so much for having me. And pranam to the Batgap Audience, jaima.

Rick  Thank you, Nish. So I’ll tell you a funny story. I was walking in the woods a month or two ago as I do most days and I ran into a friend that I’ve met there in the woods and I asked her what she’d been up to and she said, “Well, I just met this guy named Fish.” And I said, “You mean Nish the Fish?” She said, “Yeah, Nish the Fish.” I said, “He’s in Fairfield?” And she said, “Yeah.” So you were in Fairfield?

Nish  I was in Fairfield. Where’s Fairfield?

Rick  Iowa.

Nish  Interesting. As far as I recall, I haven’t been to Iowa yet.

Rick  So it must be an imposter.

Nish  Maybe an evil twin running around. I don’t know about.

Rick  Doppelganger. All right, Nish hasn’t been to Fairfield, so we cleared that up. But out of curiosity, how’d you get that nickname?

Nish  You know, there’s a Yogi that I very much look up to. His name is Matsyendranatha, the Lord of the Fishes, and he’s credited as being the founder of the Nath Sampradaya, one of the great tantric masters of yore. So, I used to debate internationally with the Malaysian team at international debating tournaments, and there was a difficulty pronouncing my name. Nishanth, you actually nailed it. That was a beautiful pronunciation. I was very impressed. But people would struggle to pronounce the name and so I was wondering, Nish, Nish, Nish, you know, something simpler. So they said Nish, but then when I would say Nish, they would say �Neesh�. So then I felt there was a need to give some kind of device to make sure that it was pronounced. I said, “Nish the fish”.

Rick  Alliteration, yeah.

Nish  Alliteration. So over time, somehow the name just stuck.

Rick  Cool. And there was an avatar of Vishnu that was a fish, wasn’t there?

Nish  Yes, Matsya, the first of Vishnu’s ten forms.

Rick  Yeah, there you go. Maybe you’re him in a degenerated state by comparison with the avatar.

Nish  In truth, all of us are just that.

Rick  Right, yeah. You mentioned Malaysia just now, I believe, and were you born in Asia?

Nish  Yes, I was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and in Malaysia there’s a very big Indian community, South Indian mostly, Tamil community. So my grandfather, my great-grandfather came over with the British colony and came to Malaysia prior to its independence. And so I grew up there and my grandfather grew up there. He spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka though, my grandfather. But my father and I both lived almost our entire lives in Malaysia.

Rick  But you speak perfect English. Was English your first language or what?

Nish  You know, Malaysia, we do our instruction in Malay. Bahasa Malaysia is the national language and so that’s what we learned at school. But there was was a strong push in school to learn English and my grandfather was a headmaster at an English school. So, at home he made it a point, he spoke to me in Tamil but mainly in English, he spoke to me mainly in English. I think. In a sense it’s my first language.

Rick  Okay, good. And you recently, well four years ago you graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy, Indian philosophy? What philosophy?

Nish  No, just philosophy in general. At UCLA we have a strong logicians headquarters, you know, like some of the Vienna circle were there. We have a lot of good like, you know, Bertrand Russell type stuff. So I learned logic. I was mostly interested in theology though and most of the theology is like Christian theology. So scholastics, Aquinas, Anselm, etc. Kant; took many classes on Kant, who I think is a very Indian mind.

Rick  And then, I understand that you have a strong background in Kashmir Shaivism, right?

Nish  Yes, my grandfather was a practitioner of Shaiva Siddhanta, the Tamil stream of Shaiva Siddhanta. And so that’s just very much in the air. It’s just part of the Shaiva heritage. And so as I started to study more philosophy and started to develop my own practice, and as I came to Paramahansa Sri Ramakrishna, which is the lineage I belong to now, I found that my real inclination is towards non-duality and of course already having grown up in the Shaiva Siddhanta world, Advaita Shaiva philosophy, otherwise known as Kashmir Shaivism these days, that just came naturally.

Rick  Okay good and you are quite prolific. I don’t know if you realize this but you have about 20 days’ worth of videos on your YouTube channel. I know that because I downloaded them all and turned them into audio files and popped them into iTunes and it said you know, almost 20 days.

Nish  A non-stop continuous 20 days of talking.

Rick  Yeah, if you wanted to listen 24/7, it would take you 20 days to listen to them all.

Nish  Oh my god.

Rick  Of course, you’d be asleep for much of it, but anyway, but it’s good stuff. I listened to many of them and I feel I have a lot that I can learn from you, and I did learn a lot listening to a bunch. One thing I’ve done to prepare for this lecture, since I didn’t have time to listen to them all, obviously, was I just scanned down the list of names of your videos and I copied and pasted some of the names that jumped out at me, some of the titles, into a document. And so, if we run out of things to talk about, which I don’t think we will, I’ll say, “Hey, what about this one and that one?” and we’ll just riff on it for a while. Yeah. Okay, so you’re eclectic, you’ve studied Christianity deeply and Western philosophy and Kashmir Shaivism and now you’re into Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and lineage. Do you have any difficulty reconciling all these or integrating them?

Nish  Yes, the beauty of the tantric heritage because Kashmir Shaivism is of course an exegetical movement that emerged within Kashmir like around the 9th, 10th century it flourished.

Rick  What does exegetical mean?

Nish  Post-scriptural or like a commentary on the scriptures and the scriptures in question here are known as the Tantras or the Agamas. And the Agamas are of course, philosophically speaking, the revelation of Lord Shiva, mythologically speaking, the revelation of Lord Shiva. And so the Kashmir Shaiva movement is an attempt to make sense of this vast and very complex world known as Tantra. So many of the authors like Abhinavagupta, their project was to reconcile and to harmonize and to systematize seemingly different streams of thought. And Swami Vivekananda, very much like Abhinavagupta, has also attempted to systematize everything into a nice coherent whole. So there’s a meta-narrative that holds everything together. And so having studied Shaiva Siddhanta, especially Kashmir Shaivism for a while, when I was initiated into the Paramahansa Ramakrishna lineage, I felt like that was pretty much a one-to-one match with this eclectic harmonization of different streams. So, Sri Ramakrishna, for instance, as you know, was very eclectic himself in that he would practice all the different forms of “Hinduism” that was available to him at the time. He was primarily a Tantrika, and his first mode of spiritual practice was devotion to the Divine Mother Kali. He did many tantric practices, but he later practiced Vaishnavism and then Advaita Vedanta and then all sorts of different movements within Hinduism. After that he practiced Islam and then Christianity and he found a way to reconcile all of it. So in the light of Sri Ramakrishna, it becomes quite easy actually to find that which is great in all the different traditions and find a common center to hold it all together.

Rick  Yeah, that’s good. I want to ask you about that, but as you’re speaking, I thought of a couple other little biographical tidbits that I just want to make sure we cover. One is that you are a fairly accomplished guitar player. Yesterday I was watching a YouTube of your band playing. I don’t know if you’re still in a band. Are you?

Nish  Yes. I wouldn’t say accomplished. I’m learning to play the guitar.

Rick  Well, yeah, you’re not John McLaughlin, but you’re good.

Nish  Thank you.

Rick  And you had a good drummer. I used to be a

Nish  Yes, I had a very good drummer.

Rick  I used to be a drummer.

Nish  Ah, what did you hear? What’s on YouTube?

Rick  I don’t remember the name of it. It was in some club or something or other. I left my band to become a meditation teacher, actually, when I was 20. And also you said that you teach in a middle school. you still do that?

Nish  Yes, I’m a middle school debate teacher.

Rick  Cool. You got like your fingers in many pies.

Nish  Yes, it’s actually all the same pie. It just has various aspects.

Rick  Yeah, no, I like that. I like your diverse interests, and that’s reflected in your spirituality too, as you were just saying. So, let’s get back to that. It’s been a while, but in the past when I’ve been confronted by like a fundamentalist Christian, I’ll start talking astronomy to them and I’ll say, “Do you realize, even if there’s one intelligent life form in each galaxy, that there are anywhere between two and ten trillion intelligent civilizations and they all have their religions and their gurus and their inspirational leaders. And, if Jesus is the only way, is he on tour? You know, to these 10 trillion?

Nish  On a North American lecture tour right now, he’s visiting other lokas. He’s in Gandharva Loka right now.

Rick  He’s a busy guy. So, you know, I just say that by way of taking a God’s eye view of the whole thing, which is that, there are just infinite streams of wisdom and spirituality and people gravitate toward what’s available and what resonates with them and what their karma would dictate and so on.

Nish  Yes, precisely and this is Sri Ramakrishna’s most famous teaching that the divine is infinitely capacious and as such there must be necessarily infinite ways to reach the divine but also infinite aspects to reach and infinite ways to enjoy the divine and speaking from the God’s eye view as you so so beautifully put. If divinity is infinite, then it expresses itself in infinite numbers of ways too.

Rick  Now that raises a question that I’ve discussed with friends at times. Do you think that different paths and practices result in different types of realization? Or do you think that people gravitate toward a particular path according to their karma and tendencies? But if enlightenment is supposed to be realization of The reality, the ultimate truth of things, could there actually be different flavors or colors of enlightenment or would it fundamentally all have to be the same thing and perhaps just being expressed in different languages or different cultural forms?

Nish  It’s a wonderful question and I think the tantric position, especially Sri Ramakrishna’s position would be the former. That there are actually different flavors. So it’s true, realization is the realization of the One divine reality, but that one divine reality is the kind of reality that can be enjoyed in infinite numbers of ways. So it’s not just that people’s karmas predispose them to certain paths, but those certain paths have their unique revelations also. And they’re all revelations of the same reality. So for instance, someone practicing in a dualistic tradition, their highest conception of realization might be to enjoy an eternally loving relationship with the divine in some heavenly realm. In Indian spirituality, that’s called a loka. So they might go to Vishnu loka, Vaikuntha loka it’s called, and then become Vishnu’s door guard or something or Vishnu’s eternal devotee or say you know those who follow Gaudiya Vaishnavism, their ideal realm is the Goloka where they will whirl about in ecstatic, intoxicated circle with Krishna and the Gopis and that according to Kashmir Shaivism would be a legitimate realization as well. In the text Pratyabhijna Hridaya Sutra one of the famous texts of the tradition, it is said “Tan Bhumika Sarva Darshana Sthitayaha” all the various schools of philosophy in the world all the various spiritual positions and paths are all valid expressions of the one divine reality. So, they are distinct and different ways of enjoying the same thing.

Rick  Okay, so I get how they’re all valid expressions and how it’s natural for people to be on different paths, but if we’re all climbing a great big mountain on different paths, ultimately there’s a mountaintop, there’s a peak. And one would think that, okay, it’s got to be the same peak, it’s not like they’re separate mountains in this analogy. The paths may be very different, but the peak itself is just the one peak. Once you get there, everybody would see the same thing. What do you think about that?

Nish  It’s a wonderful metaphor, but it breaks down with regard to the nature of the peak. Because you’re right, in so far as we’re talking about geography and geology, the peak is just the peak. You know, five different people taking five different hiking trails will arrive at the same peak and they’ll all look at each other like, “Hey, it’s you! Hey, it’s you, we’re all here! How vociferously we argued about the path down at base camp, but now look, you made it too! I never thought you would make it. You know, that’s I think our idea of what enlightenment will be like. We just all end up in heaven and we’re like, “Oh!” Or we all have this non-dual realization where it’s just the one, undifferentiated consciousness and then we all realize, “Oh, I thought it was Vishnu, I thought it was Jesus, but the whole time, those were just metaphors or symbols for the one Advaitic Brahma realization.” So we all have that, I think, view. But Sri Ramakrishna’s view is very interesting. His claim is that this one non-dual reality, which everyone arrives at, unlike a mountain peak, is infinitely diverse. So it’s like he gives the example of the elephant and many different people are touching the elephant at the same time and they’re all blind. I’m sure you’ve heard this example before and they’re all giving a report of what they’re touching. But notice, they’re all of them actually touching the elephant. So one is touching a real part of the elephant and he’s calling it like a wall and the other is touching a real part of the elephant is calling it like spiky and hard. But I guess you could say the more capacious view would be to say, “Well, the elephant does have all of these aspects. It’s got a bushy tail and a wall-like leg, and it has a spiky tusk and all of that is one way of… Each and every one of them is an interesting way of enjoying the same elephant.”

Rick  But if you have a partial view of the elephant or a partial understanding of the elephant based upon what you happen to be feeling, does that really deserve the term “enlightenment”? Does the word enlightenment necessarily imply a view of the entire elephant, to mix our metaphor with what we’re actually talking about here?

Nish  For Ramakrishna, no, it’s enough to touch just the trunk and have a partial view and not touch anything else. He describes it in terms more of Bhava than Tattva. Bhava means experience, whereas Tattva means reality. And perhaps reality is not an experience, it’s something beyond the experience, the Bhava. Ramakrishna would say if you go to a bar, a tavern, you only need to drink one cup, perhaps, depending, and you’ll be drunk. You don’t have to drink the whole tavern dry. If you want, of course, you can drink various different cups, but one cup is usually enough to get me quite a bit drunk, and that’s what he would call enlightenment. Just fulfillment. Just atyantika dukkha nivritti, the permanent cessation of all suffering, and Paramananda Prapti, the attainment of the highest fulfillment in life, which you can get from just touching the trunk. You don’t have to touch the whole elephant, you don’t have to realize the whole elephant in order to be able to say you are realized. And in a sense, realization is not like a stopping point. I know in many spiritual traditions, there’s like this cap, “Tattvajnana”, either you know it or you don’t. You realize or you’re not, you’re saved or you’re not. But I think in the tantric world, there’s this idea that there’s no end to realization, that you can touch the trunk and be fulfilled. Or if you want, you can continue your journey and then also touch the elephant’s rear and then later touch the elephant’s bushy tail and the elephant, etc, etc. But you see, it’s all part of the infinite self-exploration of the one divine reality, namely Kali or Shiva or something. So, in a sense, you’re already realized when you start out. The very beginning of the quest is an expression of realization, not an attempt to become realized, but an expression of how to enjoy the realization that you already are.

Rick  Well, I’m kind of a broken record on the notion that there’s no end to growth. So, I’m with you on that one. But I’m just trying to wrap my head around. You said bhava versus tattva, I think you just said,

Nish  yes, right.

Rick  I’ve sometimes understood bhava to mean like a mood.

Nish  Difficult to translate that word, bhava could be being absorbed in a particular aspect of God. Let’s say someone thinks about the Christ and becomes inspired, they’re in bhava. They’re in a mood, you know, or bhava could be a technical term to describe a kind of Samadhi where you forget about the world, you forget about your body, you forget about yourself. And all you can think about is God and you’re enthralled by God’s beauty. So Bhava Samadhi, bhava could also mean state, just regularly. So, like if somebody’s eating chocolate, they’re experiencing chocolate bhava, or someone’s depressed, their bhava is depressed bhava.

Rick  Yeah, Amma, the hugging saint, used to do Devi Bhava, and earlier she used to do Krishna Bhava and so on. But anyway, what I’m getting at is, if enlightenment, let me try to phrase this, so, would Ramakrishna, or to your understanding, say that it’s possible for a human being to attain a state in which they become the ultimate reality so thoroughly, so profoundly, so deeply, so comprehensively, that they’ve got the whole elephant? And they could perhaps comfortably incorporate or agree with all kinds of different philosophical perspectives as Ramakrishna did because they are all just facets of this vast reality that they know themselves to be.

Nish  Yes, I’ll take one step back from that and first start with the non-dual claim. So there’s only one reality, and it’s called Brahman from the Advaitic point of view, and that Brahman tantra calls Shiva, not to be conflated with Shiva as one of the forms of the various Puranic gods, but Shiva meaning ultimate reality, and that Shiva is of two aspects. One is called Prakasha, it illumines, pure non-dual consciousness shines, but it also has Vimarsha. Vimarsha means it’s self-reflexively aware. So Shiva is aware and he’s aware that he’s aware. And I’m using the word he here very specifically because the tantric world, this is a being. Shiva is a being by virtue of his self-awareness, not because he has a form or because he has any attributes, he’s just self-aware. Now, this self-aware being, according to the tantric worldview, the non-dual tantric worldview, is playful by nature. Freedom is his very innate quality, Svatantrya, he’s non-dual, there’s nothing that exists outside of him to limit him. So he’s free and once he becomes aware of his ever free nature, he becomes expressive and playful. So the entire universe then is Lord Shiva’s creative self-expression and creative self-exploration. So your question about can someone become the whole elephant, we have to take one step back and say no, we are all of us already the whole elephant exploring its own infinitude. So we’re God to begin with. Lord Shiva manifests the world and then enters into the world and becomes everything as it were. So Shiva, Eva, Grihitva, Pashubhava, Lord Shiva alone, the highest reality alone, manifests as all this. So you’re already the elephant to begin with, the whole elephant, except your specific incarnation, your specific expression will be drawn to maybe the tusk and you might manifest the tusk aspect more than maybe the leg aspect and someone else might manifest the leg aspect. But each of these are like shinings in the same jewel. Turn the jewel this way you get a red glint, Kali. Turn the jewel this way a blue glint maybe like that, but it’s the same jewel. So one doesn’t become God, one is God to begin with.

Rick  Right and of course the Neo-Advaita people say things like you’re already enlightened and you don’t need to do anything because you’re already enlightened.

Nish  I wouldn’t go so far, I wouldn’t go so far. I think enlightenment is the recognition that you are God, so God also conceals her own nature from herself. This is called Maya. So Shiva’s Maya is the Svatantrya, Shiva’s freedom, to do Svatma-Abharanam, which means to hide himself from himself. So, I guess enlightenment would be removing that covering. It’s not, I think, a given that everyone has done that.

Rick  No, and so it doesn’t do you a lot of good just to have the thought, “I’m already enlightened.” Everybody is already enlightened. I mean, look at the world. So let me push this a little further because I’m having fun with this. Let’s say you used your gem analogy where you know, the light is shining through different gems and so it comes out as different colors. Okay.

Nish  Yes, the same gems.

Rick  Same gem. So, from the perspective of an observer, let’s modify the analogy slightly. Let’s say different colors of glass, and the sun is shining through them all like a stained glass window in a church. So, from the perspective of the observer, there’s blue here and pink there and red there and so on, but from the perspective of of the sun, it’s the same light. And so, what we’re getting at here, I think, is we are the sun in this analogy, and then through this personality, the sun looks blue, and through this personality, the sun looks green, and so on.

Nish  Beautiful, beautiful.

Rick  Yeah, so most people are just not, they’re not aware of their status as sun. They’re just sort of aware of, “I’m a boy, I’m a girl, I’m gay, I’m straight, I’m this, I’m that. These are my attributes. This is my job, this is my family. They’re just aware of the sort of the surface manifestation qualities of their life. But what I think we’re getting at with this whole spiritual thing is to realize our essential nature, which is one of the same for all of us.

Nish  Yes, precisely.

Rick  You and I and the dog and the mosquito and everybody else has the same essential nature.

Nish  Precisely. And Ramakrishna would say the Divine Mother herself becomes the 24 tattvas, The 24 tattvas of course the Sankhya model of reality. So, he’s essentially saying the sunlight, God, the ultimate reality appears as all of this. And you’re right, within this are all sorts of different colors. So, what a beautiful metaphor you’ve given.

Rick  I don’t think I made it up. So, you know, in terms of the Gita saying, you see all beings in the self and the self in all beings. My conception of enlightenment is that subjectively, on some level, it would be the same for all enlightened people, even though the phrase “enlightened people” is an oxymoron. But it would be ultimately the same, and yet then it would be expressed differently through different personalities.

Nish  Precisely, precisely. In fact, I think Ramakrishna almost positions himself in that elephant metaphor as the one who can see the whole elephant.

Rick  Yeah.

Nish  Because, he’s able to say, “Yes, that’s true. Yes, that’s true. Yes, that’s true.” by referring to some underlying reality which he has accessed and embodied.

Rick  And I presume he would say that that’s not the sole province of avatars as he was, but others can have that same perspective or realization.

Nish  Yes, it’s actually a very interesting question because in the theology of Sri Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna is an avatar and there are other beings that are considered to be partial manifestations of the avatar, the Avatar Anshas and he calls these Ishwara Kothis. And he does say in certain places that this realization of the fullness of God is the purview of only the avatars and the Ishwara Kothis. He would say at most one can realize one or two aspects of God and here he would famously give the example of a an ant going to get sugar from a sugar mountain. Of course the mountain is vast, unfathomably vast for the ant and the ant goes and picks up one grain of sugar. I think sugar is important because it’s sweet and delightful and any aspect of reality. If we can touch even a bit of it, well, unfortunately we have to speak quantitatively, that’s the limits of the metaphor, but you’d be happy, you’d be filled with joy. And so you take a grain of sugar and the ant is on its way back home to give the sugar to all of its friends or whatever. It looks over its shoulder and it thinks to itself with much hubris, “Tomorrow I’ll come back and take the whole mountain.” And Sri Ramakrishna seems to think that Jiva Kothi’s regular souls will be satisfied with one grain of sugar. One drink of wine will knock us straight out. We don’t actually have the capacity, most of us, to hold the whole mountain and there are some great souls throughout history like Shukadeva etc. great Illumine masters in India and he says they at best can hold one or two grains but never the whole mountain. So what Sri Ramakrishna seems to be implying is that there are perhaps aspects of the mountain that maybe he doesn’t even know. He says God is all this and many more things besides and like you said so long as we live so long as we learn Sri Ramakrishna was very fond of that statement too. So I think you’re right there is sunlight there’s one basic reality and it inheres in all things as all things like you referenced in the Gita Sarvabhutanam Chatmanam, the self in all beings expressing as all beings but at the same time that’s reality, that light is so infinite that maybe it isn’t really in our cards to realize all of it. If even that’s even possible, I don’t think anybody could realize all of it given its infinite nature.

Rick  Interesting. Speaking of sugar of course Ramakrishna was fond of the; would you rather be sugar or taste sugar, and you know referring to, would you rather be one with God, as God, or maintain some separation and have a devotional relationship with God.

Nish  Can I respond to that real quick? Because I think that comes from Ramprasad. There’s a song by a famous Bengali mystic saint, a devotee of Kali, and he said, “I don’t want to be sugar.” He’s speaking from a devotional point of view. Why would I want to merge into the non-dual Brahman and just be in this like nihilistic void state? I want to be the devotee of God, and I want to sing and dance and make merry. I want to eat sugar. That’s a Ramprasad quote. And Sri Ramakrishna was very fond of it because that was his bhava as well. He would say, “Oh mother, please don’t take my mind into Samadhi. You know, here we are praying for Samadhi. He’s praying, “No, no, please. I want to sing and dance and make merry. I want to enjoy the company with devotees.” So Sri Ramakrishna is saying it’s better to taste sugar than to be sugar. He will of course say that, quoting Ramprasad when he’s in a devotional mood. But from the Kashmir Shaiva point of view, to say that this is a dichotomy, either you have to become sugar, merging in non-dual oneness, or you can taste sugar by maintaining distinguishing between you the taster and the thing tasted. From the Kashmir Shriva point of view, that’s like a false dichotomy because it misunderstands the fundamental nature of sugar. Sugar in this case is the kind of thing that can taste itself. So by becoming sugar, you don’t lose the ability to taste sugar.

Rick  It’s self-referral consciousness.

Nish  Self-referral. It’s a Vimarsha quality.

Rick  Yes.

Nish  Shiva, even Shiva, can enjoy his own Shiva-dwa, his Shiva-ness.

Rick  Interesting. I’m reminded of an idea from mathematics, which is that you can take infinity, okay, infinity is infinity, you got it, infinity, but then you can square it, or cube it, or add one to it, or add a million to it, and so you have somehow a bigger infinity. So that’s a good analogy, I think, for this idea of getting the full value of the mountain of sugar, even by taking one grain, but that grain could be multiplied many-fold, and if If you had the capacity, you could take the whole mountain. But maybe what you’re getting at or what Ramakrishna was getting at is that human nervous systems are not adequate to take the whole mountain.

Nish  Yes, and I think I love how you said nervous system because it’s true when we talk about spiritual realization, our contrary to the neo-Advaitin point of view, it is a physical thing that happens. In the tantric world, it’s an actual change that happens at the level of our chemistry and our biology. And the nerves, of course, the physical nerves are a reflex of a much subtler set of nerves called nadis in the subtle body. And realization of God, which is not just an intellectual recognition of oneness, like, “Oh, I am not the mind, I’m not the body.” No, but the experience of that on the level of the mind and body is like a shock to both the psychic and physical nervous systems. I think that’s a really good point. We might just not be able to anatomically, subtly and physically handle the surge of God realization. Our brain will be on fire, our body would be smashed asunder from such a thing.

Rick  I was with a spiritual teacher, some people asked him, “Well, can’t you just enlighten us just like that? Why do we have to go through all this trouble?” And I don’t know if he could really do that, but he said, “I could, but it would take 10 strong men to hold you down.”

Nish  Right. My guru says the same thing. He met a great Sadhu and he asked the Sadhu, “Please give me a touch, you know, give me something.” And the Sadhu said, strikingly, “I can give, but can you hold?” And that silenced me.

Rick  I’ve been talking with Daniel Ingram, I don’t know if you know who he is, but he’s a…

Nish  His name is familiar.

Rick  Yeah, he was an emergency room physician and Buddhist practitioner, and he’s starting an organization now, or has started it, in collaboration with a lot of other doctors around the world. And what they’re attempting to do is to sort of get the DSM educated to understand spiritual emergencies and spiritual realizations, you know, because somebody could start having a Kundalini awakening and be put on medications for the rest of their life or something because the doctor wouldn’t understand it. So we’ve been having some conversations about that. But I think one thing perhaps you and I have both observed is that you definitely have to take your spiritual advancement in measured doses. Because too much too quick can be dangerous.

Nish  Yes. And we advocate grounding through practices like Hatha Yoga and Pranayama to make the kind of body that can withstand these spiritual experiences. And so a lot of conditioning is necessary. Even the ritual world, I mean Tantra essentially is a ritual modality oriented around deity yoga. The ritual world is an attempt to beef up one’s psychic immunity, if you will, to be able to handle these states of realization. So Sri Ramakrishna was a special case. He’s a spiritual savant in that he had this capacity. He was such a capacious being that he was able to hold within his being, within his small frame, he was able to hold so many different streams and traditions and realizations all at once. And the uniqueness of that is he’s able to then, from that point of view, say they’re all legit, they’re all valid. And so all religions are all valid expressions of the one reality. In a sense, they’re all true because they’re all valid parts to that one reality. But in another sense, they’re also true because they’re all valid expressions of that one reality.

Rick  Yeah, and I think Krishna says in the Gita that whoever, wherever, if they express any sort of devotion toward whatever they consider God to be or some higher value or something, I get it, I receive it, I acknowledge it, it bears fruit.

Nish  Yes, or the metaphor of the mother, if a mother has five children, Sri Ramakrishna was fond of mother metaphors because of course he saw God as the Divine Mother Kali as we do. So say the mother has five children or three children, the eldest child is able to say say, Mother, you know, a very polished way. And the second eldest child maybe says, ma, ma, ma. And the youngest child is just a baby. He can only go, meh-ah, he just can’t even articulate anything beyond that. The mother knows that she alone is being referred to by all three. And in fact, she might even have a special fondness for the baby who can barely even pronounce her name.

Rick  Yeah. Okay.

Nish  I’ll just make one more point about the Institute of God because you brought up a beautiful mathematical metaphor that the infinity can actually be augmented in a sense. So the idea is that Lord Shiva, he himself, speaking from the point of view of absolute reality, he himself doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. So this kind of confounds the notion of God’s omniscience. God is omniscient in the sense that everything that exists exists within awareness. So of course there’s a small sample set of things that I know, and there’s a much bigger set of things that I don’t know. So both what I know and both what I don’t know are both of them within awareness. In that sense, I’m omniscient. Right. But from Shiva’s point of view, his omniscience, his Sarva-gyatva, his omniscience is actually being awareness that doesn’t take away from the possibility of being surprised. So because Shakti, his power of self-expression, can infinitely express herself, he’s always confronted with a new aspect of himself. So the state of realization in Kashmir Shaivism or in Tantra in general, you become a Bhairava or a Bhairavi, a fully realized being, a surprise. In each and every moment you’re in wide-eyed wonder because every scene is a new revelation to you of your own nature. It’s called a Chamatkara, poetic rapture. So you wonder about the world wordless and ecstatic, surprised and everything. “Oh I’m this! Here’s me in a new form!” And you even don’t know what could happen.

Rick  Kurt Vonnegut said that the church he belongs to is called Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.

Nish  Beautiful, that’s exactly it. My Kali is Our Lady of perpetual astonishment. Ah, could not have put it better ourselves.

Rick  There’s another quote from Saint Teresa of Avila. She said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.”

Nish  That would, I think, meet the Kashmir Shaiva ethos perfectly. You’re already realized to begin with, but what it is to be realized is to be on the journey.

Rick  Yeah.

Nish  See how it confounds our notions of progress? Like in most spiritual traditions, we’re on the way to becoming realized, but this is the total opposite use of the latter. No, we are realized, therefore we are on the way.

Rick  Yeah, okay, I want to get into direct versus progressive paths, but before I do that, since you were just talking about omniscience, I was talking to my friend Steve from Santa Monica whom I’m hoping you’re going to meet, talking to him today, and we were talking about omniscience, and I said, “Okay, well, let’s say I’m walking in the woods and here’s a pebble that I just picked up, and in this pebble there are trillions of molecules, and each little molecule is this perfect little mechanism that abides by certain laws of nature that we hardly understand. We understand some of them. Does omniscience mean that God in some way is, who is said to be nothing, the universe is nothing but God, you know, in this tradition, does that mean that God is somehow cognizant or aware of the workings of this one little molecule and the one next to it and the one next to it, or does he somehow set up laws by which all these things function and then just go and take a nap and it all works on its own or what? I mean, I don’t presume that you really know any definitive answer to this question, but you’re so well-versed in the traditions. What would those traditions say about that answer to the question?

Nish  It’s a wonderful question. First, we have to ground our understanding of God. So, God.

Rick  Good point.

Nish  Insofar as we speak of God as an other, as like this over soul or something, we’re always going to run into speculations. So, what Abhinavagupta suggests is, we take this formula, very beautiful formula. Atma Prakasha, Vapu Resha Shiva Svatantraha. This very self is God embodied in all of his splendor and freedom. So when we say God, I think the better word is, Me or You. God here in this tradition is Chaitanyam Atma, the consciousness which is none other than my very own self. So when we talk about omniscience, we have to ask about epistemology from my point of view. Right now I’m experiencing the world. In what sense am I consciousness, God, omniscient? That’s the, I think, a way to approach the question from this non-dual Shaiva point of view. And then we can make a few observations here. We can say there’s a distinction to be made between knowledge and knowing. You know, knowledge are the cognized events that occurred to me. So I know a rock, but I might not know all the trillions of particles and what they’re doing in the rock. I know what’s happening in this room but I might not know what’s going on on the other side of this wall. I can take a few guesses but I don’t know, right? So when we speak of knowledge in that sense, we’re talking about information or cognitive data. If we can make a distinction between items of information or pockets information and knowing itself, then we can have a very different understanding of omniscience. Omniscience is not just knowing everything or being aware of all the details. Omniscience is just to be aware. Because everything that is, whether known or unknown, appears in awareness. And if I am awareness, knowing itself, in precisely that sense am I omniscient.

Rick  Yeah, but I’m sure there’s more to it. Like, I know that I have a liver, but I’ve never seen my liver, and it has trillions of cells probably, or billions, or whatever, and each little cell is a marvel of intelligence. And this is one of my favorite themes also, that God is hiding in plain sight, because you look at anything and you contemplate what you’re actually looking at and it just blows your mind. So that intelligence that you see on display, what is the nature of it? Is it omnipresently cognizant of everything in the universe from macroscopic to microscopic? Is there some omnipresent knowingness that is consciously knowing each cell in my liver, or is somehow things set up automatically and they just run?

Nish  We could take a more maybe solipsistic view here like we could take a more Eka Jiva Vada view like, the only thing I can be sure of is that which is appearing to me now. You know, and that that would be a valid approach too, but you’re right, I think there are maybe more theistic, more realist views of the tradition that would say this. That right now I am a Jiva or a Pashu, an embodied soul. And so I’m Shiva, plus some self-limitation, some sankocha. So right now I’m only aware of very little and so it appears to me that there’s an entire universe beyond my knowledge and then through spiritual practice, in this tradition, the idea is that I expand my knowing. So I become aware now, not just of this body, but maybe also of the liver. You know before we take a hatha yoga class, for instance, we’re not even aware that we have hamstrings and then after the the practice you’re like, “Ow! I didn’t even know I had muscles in those places!” What is this inner growth? It’s like our world has widened, we become aware of more of our embodiment. And in the Shiva Sutras, there’s a beautiful line there, “Drishyam Shariram.” Whatever you can see is your body or to put it another way, this whole universe is God’s body and you are God. So technically it’s true. The step of realization in this tradition would be knowing that and feeling that. You should feel embodied as the whole world. So you wouldn’t just feel your own liver. You would feel every liver everywhere. I’m reminded of Swami Vikekananda. There’s a scene where he’s pacing back and forth on the balcony in his room in Belmont, and he’s obviously very distressed and someone asks him about why he’s so distressed, why he can’t sleep. It’s like in the middle of the night and he claims that there’s a volcano that just exploded somewhere in Fiji. And you know, the news hadn’t reached them yet, but he could feel the suffering of the people on that end of the planet. He just was embodied as them in a sense. Or there’s another story where Ramakrishna is looking at a boatman in the distance on the Ganga and the boatman’s assistant slaps him on the back and Sri Ramakrishna feels that, he goes “Ow!” and later it’s verified that his back becomes red. Or he would feel when people stepped on grass, he would feel like they were stepping on his own body. So there are mystical experiences, we call it “Purnahangta”, the experience of oneself as the Oversoul. In truth we are that, but maybe mercifully, for better or for worse, I don’t know that and I don’t feel that because I don’t have the capacity to handle that. But through Sadhana, through spiritual practice, one’s capacity for embodiment increases and so one’s experience of embodiment increases. And I think you’re right, at a certain point one does know about the trillions of atoms in one little rock and is aware of all the laws.

Rick  And maybe when you say one does know, it may not be human beings know because it might be beyond the capacity of a gross human nervous system. You might need a celestial nervous system to have that kind of knowledge.

Nish  Precisely, they call them Siddhas and they have a different kind of embodiment actually. They’re not limited by the hardware of being a human. Although they can at any time and in any place appear in an anthropomorphic form like Matsyendranatha or Gorakshanatha, these are great Siddhas. Even Vivekananda, you know, once he kicked the body, he kicked the mortal coil and before news of it got to his brother disciple, Sashi Maharaj in South India, he himself appeared kind of like Ben Kenobi in Star Wars, you know, he appeared as a force apparition and And he said, “Sashi, Sashi!” I spat out the body. So Vivekananda now, he’s exultant, you know, I spat out the body. Now he’s gotten out of Ram Dass’ tight shoe, he’s gotten out of the hardware, and now he has a greater capacity to work, arguably. A greater capacity to feel and to act.

Rick  Which is something Obi-Wan Kenobi said. He said, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Nish  Precisely that. And you know, George Lucas, he’s friends with Joseph Campbell, who was a disciple of Holy Mother.

Rick  Oh, I didn’t know that. I knew he was tight with Campbell, but I didn’t know he, Campbell was.

Nish  Oh, sorry, Campbell was a disciple of Nikhilananda, sorry, who was a disciple of the Holy Mother. So Holy Mother’s disciple, Swami Nikhilananda, who translated the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, his disciple was Joseph Campbell, which actually explains a lot of things. The way that Joseph Campbell thinks syncretically about all the world’s myths and stories. That’s a very Ramakrishnan approach, I think.

Rick  Yeah. Since we’ve talked about growth being a never-ending process in spiritual development, let’s talk a little bit about the so-called, direct versus progressive paths because you’ve expressed notions that actually align with both of them. And my attitude is that both simultaneously can function, but neither exclusively.

Nish  Yes. I think the way that you started this interview was so apt and so wonderful, which is on the theme of reconciliation and harmonization. Because things that seem dichotomous, it’s like the trademark of our tradition to somehow reconcile them. We want our cake we want to eat it too. So often when people are talking about the world and the ontological status of the world you’ll see that in non-dual tantra it’s like we both get the benefits of Shankara’s Vivarta. You know Advaita Vedanta says the world is an illusory appearance in Brahman. The advantage there is that God doesn’t change or God doesn’t themselves undergo any process. The drawback is the world is is no longer real. The body and mind are no longer real. And then you can easily run into all sorts of ethical problems. Chief of which is non-digested spirituality. You just make claims that you’re enlightened but you know and because you see the body and mind is real you can spiritually bypass, you can opt out of actually integrating that reality into each and every moment of your life. On the other end of the spectrum though, ontologically speaking, if the world is real then in what sense does God stand in relation to the world? Like you pointed out earlier, does God just create the world and then go to sleep and allow the world to run mechanistically? Or is God involved with every step of the process like some helicopter parent or something? And if so, what horrible mismanagement that all the sorts of problems of evil arise and everything. So if the world is real, that’s a real problem for God, it seems like. And then God might have changed or transformed or the whole thing. This is Ramanuja’s Parinama Vada, God transforms. Our position is a bit of both. It’s an appearance in God without any real change in God’s being, but it’s a real appearance, a real manifestation of God. So that’s ontologically speaking. So take this down to the level of the individual in spiritual practice, that allows for both views, the direct path view, that I’m already Shiva as I am, pure non-dual consciousness, and in me arises the experience of the body and mind. But because the body and mind are real manifestations of my non-dual nature as pure consciousness, it’s therefore still productive to try to integrate my Shiva-tva, my Shiva nature into my embodiment, which is where all the progressive practices become emphasized.

Rick  Yeah, so let’s say that you know you see on the news that a certain number won the lottery and you happen to have that number. Okay, so you’re a multi-millionaire. But, you haven’t taken the steps necessary yet to cash in the ticket, to get an attorney, and an accountant, and you know all the stuff you have to do before you can actually begin spending the money.

Nish  Yes, that’s my favorite metaphor. It’s like direct Path Jnana. Path Jnana is like knowing you have the money in the bank and that itself is wonderful. It gives you great peace. But the practice of Tantra is in a sense, yes, going to the bank and withdrawing the money and then actually enjoying it, spending it, having fun.

Rick  Yeah, so you have to do some stuff to make it.

Nish  You have to do some stuff. But importantly, not to get the money. I think that’s where we really benefit from the direct path. Because in the progressive path, there’s sometimes this “I’m born in original sin” vibe that you get, like “I’m broken in need of fixing. I’m deficient in need of growing.” And so in that sense, the direct path criticism is valid, I think. As long as spirituality is in the future, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’ll never recognize the truth, which is always here and now, inhering in my experience, if I’m always wishfully thinking that it’s going to come later, after the next experience, or once I make it to the Himalayas, or once I find a bearded Indian guy to take me on as his disciple. You know, there’s always some kind of fetishization of the future. And so the direct path people, they’re quite right to point out that this is a problem in the progressive path. But we say, importantly, that I already have the money. I’m already innately divine. You know, I’m already free. But, I have to do something to manifest that freedom and enjoy that freedom, arguably. It doesn’t change that I’m free, it’s just the difference is that, you know, who wants a grumpy Gyani? Like, there are a lot of direct paths, they’re free, but you know, they’re not enjoying their freedom, they’re just as miserable as the rest of us, with a little bit more peace and assurance maybe, but not that much more, I don’t think.

Rick  Yeah, I’m not even so sure they’re free, it could just be an intellectual, there’s a Tibetan saying “don’t mistake understanding for realization”.

Nish  Precisely, precisely, yes.

Rick  Yeah, I mean you can kind of hypnotize yourself if you think about something or read about something or hear something enough times you end up believing it, but is it real?

Nish  Precisely, is it real in your experience? Exactly.

Rick  Okay, good. How long have you been doing your YouTube videos?

Nish  I think we started in 2020, So it’s about five years now.

Rick  Four or five years. Do you sometimes look back at some things you were saying four or five years ago and think, errr not so much?

Nish  All the time. I said that about, I feel that about things I said 20 minutes ago.

Rick  That’s good.

Nish  I’ve become much more realist over the years. Like I think when I first started out, I was maybe a bit more in the Advaita Vedanta camp. I mean, it’s true. I grew up within Shaiva Siddhanta. Mine is a ritual world, the world of Tantra, where it’s all about Puja and Deity Yoga and all of that. That has been the case with me. But when I was lecturing, I tended to favor the more Mayavadin language, you know, the world is an illusory appearance and like that. But I think over the years, these past five years, I’ve moved a bit more towards realism, where I’m starting to feel into this, I think, Tantric realism, where it’s It’s like everything is real, but real as God. R

Rick  Real as what? God?

Nish  Real as God, yes.

Rick  As God, yeah.

Nish  But not as matter or energy, not as a world, but as God, as a real appearance and a real manifestation of God. Therefore, everything has value.

Rick  I’m kind of the same way. I’ve made a similar shift over the years. I like Advaita Vedanta and I love listening to Swami Sarvapriyananda. I take his classes and everything. But there’s something about Kashmir Shaivism, although I only have a really kindergarten understanding of it, but there’s something about the life-affirming nature of it, insofar as I’ve understood it, which resonates more with my experience or proclivities or something.

Nish  Yes, right, right. Swami Sarvapriyanandaji is a very important mentor of mine. I actually mentioned this interview at the dinner table with Swami Medhanandaji and Swami Sarvapriyanandaji, and they both were very excited. They said, “Oh yes, we know Rickji and it was really fun,” and etc.

Rick  Yeah, I’ve interviewed them both. I like them a lot. That whole gang of the Vedanta Society, I have a real good feeling about it.

Nish  Yeah, yeah. Because notice, even though Swami Sarvapriyanandaji represents Advaita Vedanta on the world stage as his predecessor Swami Vivekananda did to an extent, it’s a different kind of Advaita Vedanta. I mean, Swami Sarvapriyanandaji, he speaks based on Shankara’s commentaries and he’s of course an Acharya, a great teacher and expounder of Advaita Vedanta, but he differs, I think in many significant ways from the standard traditional Advaita Vedanta teacher because of his grounding in the Ramakrishna lineage. You know, so he’s obviously got a much more devotional flavor to his presentation of Advaita Vedanta, a much less, I think, orthodox and dogmatic approach you’ll find in him. So yeah, his Advaita Vedanta, I mean, we’ve had so many conversations between us about like Kashmir Shaivism, Advaita Vedanta, and the main difference is the self reflexivity. I remember once at the dinner table, he said it this way, he said Kashmir Shaivism falls apart from the very beginning. And he said it’s because of that self-reflexivity. In Advaita Vedanta, there’s this concept, Svatma-Prakasha, like awareness Brahman is self-illumining, you know, so therefore it’s not void, it’s not nihilistically presented, it’s real and it’s real consciousness, but it’s not a person, it’s a principle. It’s a self-illumining principle. Whereas Advaita Vedanta, there’s more theistic flavor where this principle is self-reflexively aware. That’s the big difference between the two. But I mean, when he pointed out there are texts like Sureshwaracharya’s commentary on Shankara’s Dakshinamurti Sutra, you know, that’s attributed to Shankara. And there we speak about the world shining non-differently in the mirror of awareness. And the very name of Sureshwaracharya’s commentary, Sureshwaracharya, mind you, is Shankara’s disciple. The name is Manasollasa, which is such a Tantric name. And his commentary is so incredibly Tantric. And even medieval authors like, Vidyaranya Swami, they waxed very Tantric in their expositions of Advaita Vedanta. And Sri Ramana Maharshi himself would say things like, “The world is Brahman.” So I think the distinction between Advaita Vedanta and Tantric non-duality is often quite blurred in practice.

Rick  What did Swami Sarvapriyananda mean when he said, “Kashmir Shaivism falls apart”?

Nish  Because it’s fundamental axiom, it’s primary stance is that awareness is self-aware. Shiva, Prakasha is endowed Vimarsha. And so when I speak to Swami Sarvapriyanandaji, the two of us are almost always discussing the difference between Svat Prakasha and Vimarsha. So I keep pressing him on this point. I’m like, in what sense is Svat Prakasha different from Vimarsha? And of course, Swami Sarvapriyanandaji rightly points out Chitsuki and he points out the 11 definitions of Chitsuki.

Rick  I think you better define some of these terms. The terms are flying pretty fast here.

Nish  Okay. Once you mentioned Swami Sarvapriyanandaji, now we’ve gone into a very technical world of Indian philosophy where it’s Advaita Vedanta versus the finer points of Svatantrya-vada. I start using a lot of Sanskrit phrases really quickly because I start nerding out very quickly. So yes, thank you, thank you. Let me ground myself a bit. But yes, because Swami Sarvapriyanandaji, his main claim is that awareness cannot be reflexively self-aware.

Rick  Why not?

Nish  That’s a good question. And it has to do with the philosophical principle of non-self reflexivity. It’s like a doorknob cannot turn itself. Or for instance, the eyeballs. The eyeball can look at everything in the room, including a reflection of themselves, but they cannot literally see themselves. The eyeballs can’t ogle themselves. It’s impossible for the eyeball to be self-reflexively aware. I have to have the mind, and the mind is then aware of the eyeballs. The eyeballs are an other to the mind, and awareness is something other than the mind. So I as awareness am aware of the mind as an object, and I as a mind am aware of the eyeballs as an object and I as the eyeballs am aware of the room as an object. And a subject can never be an object to itself. So if awareness could be aware of itself in that sense, if it could be its own object, then you end up with what in Sanskrit is called Anavastha Dosha, which means the paradox of infinite regress. If there is a subject for this subject, there can potentially be a subject for that subject and a subject for that subject and a subject for that subject, and then you wouldn’t have an ultimate subject. And if there’s no ultimate subject, no objective experience is possible. So that’s one problem. And then of course we say, no, no, it’s not in that sense that awareness is self-aware. Awareness does not become an object to itself. It’s just awareness is self-aware in the same way that a light is self-illumining. You know, the light shines, it reveals all the objects in the room, but in so doing it also self-illumines. It’s radiant and you become aware of the light. Similarly, awareness objectifies everything, but it itself in so doing is self-aware. So we have these kind of very nuanced discussions between Sva-Prakasha and Vimarsha. But I think the main difference is this, in agency. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is Nishkriya and Nishkama. It has no desire, that’s important, and it doesn’t do anything. Brahman is totally inert. In fact, the word that Kashmir Shiva’s use for Advaita Vedanta is Shanta Brahmavada, the doctrine of the peaceful and quiescent Brahman. Whereas in Advaita Shaiva, non-dual Shaiva philosophy, Brahman is endowed with infinite creative power, Kartritva, a doership. So Brahman actually acts and has will and has knowledge and has activity and that’s the main difference I think between Swami Sarvapriyananda, Advaita Vedanta position and this Kashmir Shaiva position. But he’s very friendly of course towards the Kashmir Shaiva school because he’s not that dogmatic about the Advaita Vedanta stuff.

Rick  Let me just interject for the audience’s sake that you teach regular classes, apparently several a week, and if people would like to get involved in these, I will provide some kind of link on your page on BATGAP so that they can find out how to do so. Okay, so let me run something by you on this point that you’re discussing and see what you think. So, Lakshmanjoo and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spent a lot of time talking together and a lot of Lakshmanjoo’s teachings were kind of bequeathed to Maharishi through the, what’s that couple’s name, his archivists.

Nish  John and Denise Hughes.

Rick  That’s it, that’s who I’m trying to think of. He spent years talking about what he called the self-referral nature of consciousness and what he meant by that was this. I think this might have derived from Kashmir Shaivism, but let me just lay it out real briefly. So, you know, at the most fundamental level, you have consciousness, right? And there’s nothing else down there. So, its nature is to be conscious. So, what’s it going to be conscious of if that’s all there is, is consciousness? Okay, it becomes conscious of itself, but in so doing, it immediately sets up a trifold nature of observer, observed, and object of observation. So all of a all of a sudden you have one becoming three, but how can one become three? It’s one. And yet it’s three, and yet it’s one, and yet it’s three. And so, there’s this sort of infinite frequency of alternation between one and three which creates the infinite dynamism at the foundation of creation which gives rise to the whole explosion of creativity that we see. And of course, three then further bifurcates and trifurcates and so on to become all the great diversity and physicists have actually matched this up with the unified field and fundamental emergence or enlivenments of that field. Is that a Kashmir Shaivism thing?

Nish  Oh my god, one-to-one, you know, I mean there’s a beautiful phrase. Basically what you describe is called the Spanda. Spanda means the creative throb or pulsation of the One being aware of itself and there’s a beautiful Shloka that Abhinavagupta gives us. He goes, naumya chit pratibham devim param bhairava yoginim Matrmaana prameyam cha shoola Bhuja kritaaspadam It explains the one in three. So he argues that there is awareness, Chit, and that awareness has as its inseparable consort this Devi called Paradevi or sometimes called Pratibha as the verse calls it. Pratibha has the connotation of intuition, so awareness intuits its own being, it’s self-aware and this self-intuition is also sometimes called Svatantra Shakti, Ananda Shakti or Spanda and Spanda means throb or pulsation and then this Ananda Shakti or this throb then manifests in a tripartite way as knower, knowing and known – Pramatar, Prameyam, Pramanam – These three are called the three spokes of the trident. So the three spokes of this trident you know are the transcendent, the immanent, the transcendent immanent or the knower, the known and the act of knowing and these three are united in one, the actual staff of the trident. So three in one is of course a very important model in Kashmir Shaivism. In fact, Abhinava Gupta uses this three in one model throughout his entire liturgical work to kind of reconcile various traditions. And the idea of, throb, of course, like you pointed out so beautifully, the quantum mechanics people really love it. And that’s why I think outside CERN, they have a dancing Shiva. There’s a book, the Tao of Physics.

Rick  Yeah, Fritjof Capra. I had breakfast with him at one of the SAND conferences.

Nish  How beautiful, beautiful. He made this point. He was on a beach and I think, I don’t know if this is in the book, but I remember him saying like he was on a beach and then he saw for the first time what he’d been studying for so long, he experienced it in a kind of mystical vision. He said, “I finally understand what the Hindu means by the dancing Shiva.” So of course, the dancing Shiva is meant to express the dynamic, creative, playful nature of consciousness, which manifests as one in three.

Rick  Nice. Okay, a question came in. Irene says it’s a good one and let’s see what it is. This is Laura Gibson from the UK. “I know spiritual experiences are not the goal. However, I had more experiences before consciously being a seeker, such as vast emptiness and my vision turning golden. Why has this stopped? Am I doing something wrong? Was I closer to awakening before deliberately seeking?”

Nish  Yes, perhaps. Perhaps. I mean one thing to note is that wow what a what a mystery spiritual life is. You know and I think for Laura Gibsonji none but your guru can probably answer this question. So I would recommend that you seek out a lineage and a spiritual teacher because I’m sure there are a lot of factors in your life that you’re not able to express through the question. So who can say? Who can give a definitive answer here? It would be glib I think for me to say yes, it’s because you fetishize this idea of finding and therefore you become a seeker that you’ve closed yourself off to the immediacy of each and every moment. But it could also be that you’ve become more refined. You know, I know a very wonderful story. There’s a lady, a beautiful lady and powerful teacher who started the Kali Mandir in Laguna Beach. Her name is Usha Harding and her book, The Black Goddess of Dakshineshwar, is perhaps the definitive book on Kali for anybody wanting to learn about Kali for the first time. So she talks about how she would go to the temple and speak to Shri Ram Krishna directly. She would sit in the Hollywood ashrama and look at the picture of Shri Ramakrishna and the two of them would actually talk. And then it just stopped happening in that tangible and direct way. So Shri Ramakrishna would often say also, he would make a joke about this, he would say when two lovers are just getting to know each other, they have to see each other a lot all the time. But then once they have an actually intimate relationship, it becomes much more relaxed. It’s a bit like this, like say you’re courting somebody, when they come over to your house, you prepare everything really nicely. You know, you have a nice cup of tea and you clean up the the whole house. But once you’ve been dating for four years, you just sit on the couch thumbing through the channels on TV and you ask them to bring you the coffee. You’re like, “Hey, you go with this.” It’s like that. So Laura Gibson, your relationship to the Divine might just be deeper. It’s deeper so you don’t need all of these experiences here and there. You’re already in. So I think God needs to give you less pieces of candy or something like that. So I don’t think seeking is the problem. I think seeking is wonderful. One should seek. But maybe the fetishization of experiences as a marker for one’s spirituality, maybe that has to go away. Spirituality, as Laura Gibson herself pointed out, has a lot more to do with character than it does to do with experiences. Experiences are of course not the point, they could be valuable, or they could just be happening on a much deeper, much more refined level now than they were before, you know?

Rick  Yeah, yeah, that’s a lot in that. I think perhaps even some of the Christian mystics say this; that initially they had flashy experiences that really lit their fire and got them going and on the path, but eventually they went into a dark night of the soul where they weren’t experiencing very much. It seemed dry, but it’s not like they weren’t making progress. It’s just that maybe they didn’t need the enticing candy incentive.

Nish  The lovers have become more intimate, you know, now they can shout at each other. But also another thing is that our concept of a spiritual experience I think changes as we continue on the path. So in the beginning it’s like flashy lights. I saw an apparition, I saw some lights, or I had this feeling of vastness, or suddenly all the walls melted etc etc. Then all of that stuff stops and instead something very different happens. A glass of water on the table becomes a divine rapture. It’s like the mundane world becomes more mystical and the mystical world becomes more mundane. You know, so that that shock of seeing an apparition diminishes a lot, but the shock of seeing, I don’t know, the sun setting becomes increasingly magnified a thousandfold.

Rick  Another thought that comes to mind, Laura, is what are you actually doing in your spiritual practice? Because some spiritual practices might be counterproductive. Could be that they don’t know what she’s doing.

Nish  That’s such a specific predicament that’s specific to you, Laura, that that’s why the first and foremost suggestion would would be to find a genuine spiritual teacher. Of course, make sure that teacher is genuine, belong to a tradition, and then that person will be able to guide you more closely and more appropriately than just people on the internet.

Rick  Well, that’s a sticky wicket, finding a genuine spiritual teacher. Here’s some titles from some of your YouTube videos, Role of the guru, Problem of unethical gurus, The genuine guru and how to avoid a fake, Rogue Gurus and Fallen Yogis, How to Practice Guru Yoga. It’s a minefield out there.

Nish  Oh my god, Rickji, have we run out of things to talk about that you’re now looking through your document for the titles?

Rick  No, no, this is something I wanted to talk to you about because I’ve helped to establish this organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity and we have nearly seven hundred members and forty member organizations and so on. But boy, the stories you hear, both in my position in Batgap and in that of spiritual teachers behaving reprehensibly, it’s tragic, considering how sacred and precious the spiritual path is.

Nish  Yes, because you can’t really talk about Tantra without mentioning the role of the Guru. Like Guru Yoga and Guru Parampara is at the heart, arguably, of the Tantric tradition. It’s a It’s a very lineage-based transmission. So gurus become very important. But you’re right, over the past few decades, I think many unscrupulous individuals have used that and I think positioned themselves in positions of power as like important cult figures and then abused, I think, what might actually be in most cases genuine spiritual power. They maybe misused that power for unethical ends. And so you’re right, it’s a very big issue and it’s something we talk about a lot in our community as well. Because in the Ramakrishna lineage, of course, ethics is very strongly stressed. In the Indian spiritual world in general, the opening of almost any Advaita Vedanta text is going to be a list of prerequisite qualities that not the teacher but the student needs to have in order to even take up the study of Advaita Vedanta. So in yoga, for instance, the yamas and the niyamas, these are very important. Ethics are very important for any spiritual practice. But I think after a while, maybe masters or self-proclaimed masters, people who are genuinely spiritually advanced beings might also become a little destabilized by the lack of understanding of guru yoga here in the West. They might have done fine in the East actually. Maybe in the East, people could understand the guru-student relationship in a maybe more mature way than they can do here, seeing as it’s kind of new here. And so people come here and they set up their communities, and then it very quickly becomes like this cult of personality, commune thing and it loses its grounding. You know it’s very dangerous and so selecting a guru is a very tenuous process. Swami Vivekananda speaks about this a lot. He says that the student must have three qualities. One, the student must genuinely want spirituality. There must be this real hunger, this real yearning and pining for actual spirituality and that’s something that awakens in the student. Secondly the student must have infinite patience and thirdly the student must have infinite perseverance. So the student must not go in for short-term goals. The kind of student who is impatient is perhaps the kind of student that can be easily swayed by a guru liberally giving Shaktipathas because they get caught up in the glamour of everything. So patience and perseverance is very important. That’s the mature student. Then, the student must test the teacher like a money lender tests coins. That really makes sure the teacher has integrity. The first thing is that the teacher should have a teacher. The big problem today is people don’t hold teachers to that standard. They think that teachers can just spring out of the earth, but teachers should have a teacher and their teacher should have a teacher and their teacher should have a teacher. So a lineage is very important. But secondly, scripture is very important too. In the tantric world we say, “Sadh Agama, Sadh Guru.” So there must be a true scripture as well. So the teacher must be able to cite their sources and the teacher must empower you to do the same. Ultimately, scriptures are there just to keep teachers accountable. So they don’t just like make up their own idiosyncrasies and create their own religion, that they’re actually representing an authentic, peer-reviewed, corroborated tradition. And of course, thirdly, reason is very important. A person must always use their reasoning faculties to test what the teacher is saying. And finally, most importantly, I think, the teacher must be doing it for the right reasons. The teacher must be ethically grounded and pure. Swamiji calls this Akamahata. Actually no, he’s quoting from Shankara’s text, Viveka Chudamani, and there the word is Akamahata, which literally means undestroyed or undegenerated by desire. So the teacher must not be teaching for money or for some sexual advantage or for some name and fame. The teacher must be teaching as an act of love. From freedom unto freedom only this gift can be given.

Rick  That’s a really good checklist that you just gave us there. And unfortunately a lot of times teachers aren’t that transparent so they can be presenting themselves as in accordance with all the things you just said and there can be some funny stuff going on behind the scenes that only gets discovered later on.

Nish  The internet has greatly exacerbated this problem because we can be whoever we want to be on the Instagram and I think that’s the danger. If we judge a teacher based on their Instagram wall or based on their YouTube videos, see a charismatic individual who can speak eloquently about a subject is not a guru. Not necessarily. It takes a lot more than just being a powerful person to be a guru. In fact, I think one of the best ways we can test the teachers by testing their students, the guru’s job is not to be cool and flashy and eloquent. The guru’s job is to teach. So the quality of that guru’s student, I think, tells you a lot about the teacher. But you’re right. Until we’re actually in person with a guru, these days at least, I think we should be very careful about making judgments based on the internet as to the quality of the teacher. But then you’re right. Even in person, you’re right, it’s quite easy, I think, to present a facade. And especially if you have this inner circle, you can really create the sense that you’re like morally pure and like you’re ethical. I think this happened, a lot of people in some spiritual communities were shocked when they found out about their teachers engaging in maybe sexually unethical practices or taking money or drinking or something, they were shocked because the teacher in their lectures presented ethics as being the centerpiece of yoga. They would talk about the yamas and niyamas and then behind closed doors they would violate all the very rules that they set out as ideals for the community.

Rick  Yeah.

Nish  Yeah, it’s true, it’s true.

Rick  You wonder how they sleep at night, you know? In their quiet moments you’d think they’d be saying, “What am I doing?”

Nish  I have a lot of compassion also for people like that because it’s very disequilibrating, you know, when people put you on a pedestal and everyone’s looking at you as like the guru, as God or something. If you’re not careful you can start to believe it. Like, “Oh, maybe I am God. You’re right. Maybe I am, you know, the king of my self-proclaimed nation. After all, this little hermitage that we have, it’s an independent nation. And all those baser animal qualities that we all carry with us, these animal samskaras that are embedded in our biology, they just become greatly exacerbated. It’s a very disequilibrating thing and I think it happens to the best of us. People start with very good intentions, they’re true teachers from a true lineage, but then I think usually when they come to America and they start their commune, usually that’s when things become a little iffy after about 10 or 20 years. So I have great compassion for individuals like that. It’s a difficult thing to teach spirituality.

Rick  Yeah, and you can still derive tremendous benefit from association with such a teacher.

Nish  I knew someone, I asked her about it. She was involved in one of these communities. Of course I won’t take names, I don’t mean to judge anybody. She was there in such a community, which became very problematic very quickly. And she was there during the heyday of its community’s problems, you know. And I was speaking to her about it. And we were talking about crazy wisdom and that kind of thing. And she said to me, she’s like, “Yes, there were a lot of problems, but it was real.” She was in her 70s, she, very grounded individual. She said, “No, it was a real transmission. There was real power. I really benefited from the presence of that teacher and from their Sangha, but I also will not deny that all that horrible stuff happened.” So her conclusion was that real teacher, really powerful, complicated person.

Rick  Yeah. Well, you don’t have that problem. I heard you say in one lecture that you wet your bed one night after being kicked out of your rock band.

Nish  That did happen.

Rick  You’re down to earth.

Nish  Yes, that did happen. I did. What will I do next?

Rick  Don’t mean to embarrass you.

Nish  No, it’s true though, it happened. Yes.

Rick  Okay, so now as we go along here, don’t rely exclusively on my questions. If some thought pops into your head that you’d like to talk about, then we can launch into that. Otherwise, I’ll look down at my notes and pull up some things. So, oh, there’s a question? Irene’s going to send a question in a second. She’s just getting it ready. So, here you mentioned one of your things was the dark side of Tantra. First of all, better define Tantra because I think the common understanding might not be adequate compared to what it really is and what its history is and so on. But then talk about its bright and dark sides.

Nish  Yes, yes, yes. It’s a wonderful question and very deep and very nuanced. Tantra is of course, at its core, a form of deity yoga with the central modality being ritual worship. So tantra, it’s, I mean, it’s argued that tantra predates the Vedic period. We find seals from Mohenjo-Daro, Harappan civilization from the Indus Saraswati Valley, which radiocarbon dating says is 3,800 BCE thereabouts, of gods like Shiva and Durga, very prominent tantric figures. So you could argue tantra period of the Vedas. Some scholars argue tantra is a Dravidian movement that interceded into a Northern Vedic tradition. But I think many scholars understand tantra to be a movement that emerged in the Indian subcontinent from within the religion of Shaivism around the sixth or seventh century AD. So it’s pretty recent. It’s a pretty recent movement in Indian spirituality. It most certainly emerged from within Shaivism, but very quickly entered into Buddhism from there. And then of course, and into Vaishnavism. So Tantra is not itself a religion, it’s a way of doing spirituality that influences many of the religions in the Indian subcontinent.

Rick  Would it be part of what is commonly known as Hinduism or some kind of offshoot or separate stream?

Nish  I mean it definitely emerged within Shaivism which is one of the branches of broader Hinduism. But Hinduism is a very complicated term because that term was only used much later after the British colonization and it was first used, the first Indian to use that word Hindu was Raja Ram Mohan Roy who belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, and that was a movement in Bengal and Kolkata that was very much in apologetics, you know, they were trying to scrub “Hinduism” of all its Hindu elements and so what you ended up with is a kind of Upanishadic Christianity. And so the word Hinduism, I’m kind of uncomfortable with it, because it conglomerates a lot of different spiritual traditions. Because almost like Shaivism is its own religion and Vaishnavism is also its own religion. But in India, of course, these are all seen as various aspects of the Sanatana dharma, the overarching religion. So yes, tantra is a part of sanatana dharma, but I think sanatana dharma is inclusive enough to the extent that I can even say there’s tantric forms of Islam. I would argue that a lot of Sufism in India is tantric in nature. Take for instance Hazrat Inayat Khan, a very important teacher who came to America and taught Sufism here. His Sufism is of course Indian tantra. So I think…

Rick  So what makes something tantric?

Nish  Yes, it’s a good question. So So I think it’s this: primarily, primarily the central feature of tantra is ritualism. And so the foundation of tantra is dualistic worship of a particular deity through ritual practices. And those ritual practices are very nuanced and very complicated, but they’re an embodied way of doing spiritual practice. So there are, for instance, ritual gestures that one might do with the hands. There’s ritual gestures that one might do with the body. And there’s of course ritual gestures that one might do with the mouth. It’s a speech act that ultimately defines ritual. So Tantra is also sometimes styled Mantra Marga, the path of mantras. Mantras become very important in Tantra. So any embodied form of spiritual practice that sees the body as a means and not as an obstacle to spirituality, that primarily uses mantra as a way to get closer to divinity, I think can properly speaking be called Tantric. A few key features though in Tantra is the emphasis on the direct transmission from a Guru. Guru Parampara is one of the main features of Tantra. Secondly, the proliferation of deities. Another thing I like very much about Tantra is it emphasizes the need for experience. It’s very much a progressive path orientation. The purpose of spiritual life is to have a direct tangible experience of Deity. But since everyone is different, Tantra has to diversify its means and therefore it comes up with this model known as the Ishta Devi or the Ishta Devata, one’s chosen ideal. So the role of the Guru is to assess you as to what kind of predisposition you have and to assign to you a form of the deity that best meets you where you’re at. You know, so some people will worship Kali, others might worship Krishna, others might worship Shiva, but in Tantra, these are all diversification. See, within Kali even, in Tantra, Kali is diversified into 10 aspects. Kali, Tara, Shodashi, Bhuvaneshwari, Bhairavi, these are all forms of the same goddess, but there are many different forms to meet different aspirants at different parts of their journey. So therefore tantra is deity yoga but also a diversification or proliferation of deities in order to accommodate various spiritual predispositions.

Rick  Incidentally the word is proliferation.

Nish  Oh thank you, thank you.

Rick  Proliferation. Not profileration.

Nish  Proliferation, thank you.

Rick  I heard that on YouTube videos, sorry.

Nish  I’m glad because a lot of my English is from reading not from speaking so sometimes I misread something it just stays with me. So proliferation.

Rick  That’s right. Similar to the word prolific.

Nish  Ah, yes.

Rick  If a person produces a lot of stuff, it’s they’re prolific.

Nish  Good, good. Yes, that’s it. Proliferation of deities. So many deities appear. And I think one very important feature in tantra also is we have ritual, we have guru, we have proliferation of deities, but we also have an emphasis on the Divine Feminine. So I think above all, Tantra, especially in its more non-dual form like the Kaula and Kalikula, it’s a revisiting of deity as goddess, which I think might have existed prior to the Vedic civilization. It makes somewhat of an appearance in Vedic civilization, but I think it’s not until Tantra the goddess becomes front and center in spiritual life. So I would say the cult of the Divine Mother, the worship of God as mother or as the divine feminine as Shakti, that I think is the central feature of tantra. But not all tantra is like this. A lot of tantra is still worshipping God as a patriarchal figure, sure, but I think that’s one of the maybe trademarks of tantra, goddess worship.

Rick  Now, I don’t know what percentage of our audience this would apply to, but I imagine a fairly significant percentage. Culturally, they can’t relate to the idea of deities and gods and goddesses, and they look at the pictures from Indian iconography and they think, “Well, that’s very colorful and a little weird sometimes.” But is this just the product of some vivid imaginations or is there some actual reality that these images represent?

Nish  Yes, yes. It’s a great question. Yes and no, because these deities appear to rishis or seers in their meditation. So arguably a deity, any deity, will have four aspects. Its grossest aspect is its anthropomorphic or zoo-anthropomorphic form. So we look at the art and by the way we should also mention this that tantra is not just a spiritual movement, it’s primarily that, but it’s also a social movement, a political movement and I think it’s also above all an artistic and aesthetic movement because it’s not just that the deities proliferate, it’s that art proliferates. There’s like all sorts of artwork that emerges in in the tantric period. And you’re right to point out that the main form of this artwork is paintings of gods and goddesses. So you might see Kali with the sword and the severed head or with tongue sticking out, standing on the chest of her husband Mahakala in the cremation ground. So these actually, their forms are described by a series of verses known as Dhyana Shlokas. So for instance, a sage might be meditating and the sage has an experience of a particular aspect of Godhead. say Kali, the sage sees Kali in the inner shrine of her meditation and then she spontaneously presents us with this hymn. For instance, the Kali hymn: Kreem Karala vadanam Ghoram Mukta Keshim Chaturbhujam, [Kalikam Dakshinam Divyam] She has wild hair, she has four arms. Munda Maala Vibhushitam She is garlanded in heads. That is the southward facing goddess Dakshinakali. She is Kali. And then the poet, having expressed this, gives an inspiration to the artist to paint it. So all the paintings you see of anthropomorphic forms like gods and goddesses both in the Tibetan tantric tradition, the Vajrayana or Tibetan tradition and also in the Hindu Indic tradition, what you see is an artist’s rendition of these dhyana shlokas, these verses that describe the form of the deity. But that’s considered in tantra to be the most exterior form of the goddess. The goddess is externally presenting herself as a form out of her grace because we’re human, we’re anthropomorphic in nature, therefore our concept of divinity must also be anthropomorphic. So in a sense, the deity’s projection as a human form is to meet us where we are. But when we go deeper, we find that what the deity actually is, arguably behind her form, is a sacred geometrical pattern called a yantra. So for instance, this is the Kali yantra. This yantra would be the geometric pattern in consciousness that corresponds to Kali. So it’s a slightly subtler aspect of Kali. I see I see you too have a yantra behind you. Is that the Sri Chakra or what exactly is it?

Rick  Oh, up on the wall. I think, I’m not sure what yantra. I don’t really know my yantras, but this is something we picked up somewhere along the way.

Nish  It looks like a Buddhist yantra.

Rick  What is it, Irene? I; No, from Amma’s.

Rick  We got it from Amma’s organization.

Nish  So it must be a Sri Chakra. I can’t quite make it out, but it’s like, if it has many triangles, it’s a Sri Chakra. I; Can you hear me? It protects the home.

Rick  It’s supposed to protect the home, whatever this is.

Nish  Oh, is that Irene? Hi, Irene. Nice to hear your voice.

Rick  He’s saying hi.

Nish  Yeah so that’s the yantras you know they describe a form of the deity and and it’s [a] subtle form, it’s yantric form but even subtler than that, Rick the arguably the true form of the deity is it’s mantra. So subtler than even the sacred geometry of a yantra is that pattern in consciousness called mantra and mantra of course can be spoken aloud on the speech level that’s called Vaikhari, it can be chanted internally in a mental way that’s called a Madhyama. It can be experienced in a spiritual way that’s called Pashyanti. But ultimately that mantra, whether it’s being repeated aloud or silently mentally repeated within, that mantra is indistinguishable from the deity. Nama Nami Abhed. The name and that to which the name refers are one and the same reality. And then arguably even deeper than that is the deity as pure consciousness. So notice it’s an emanationist model from pure non-dual consciousness emanates a sound, a vibration. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God. That logos, that word is called “Om” but emanating from “Om” are these various mantras, if you will, and those mantras then further emanate as yantras, geometric designs in consciousness, and those when interpreted by the gross physical mind appear to be this or that god or goddess.

Rick  Would it be fair to say you think, that a deity is most primordially an impulse of the ocean of intelligence, like a wave on the ocean of intelligence arising, and obviously there are different waves, different deities performing different functions in creation?

Nish  I think that’s a beautiful way of putting it, because you brought up quantum mechanics, we could say it’s a repeating pattern of consciousness. So, it’s a wave, but it’s a static wave, it’s a standing wave, it’s maybe misusing that phrase.

Rick  But it’s not just mechanistic, it’s an impulse of intelligence.

Nish  Yes, awareness itself projects these deities. So they are real archetypal expressions of awareness. You’re right, it is a wave whose water is the same. So every deity is a unique wave with a unique shape and with a unique form. Like I as a worshipper of Kali, we love the color red and we have a certain disposition, the way we do ritual, the way that we approach spiritual life is going to be different from our Vaishnava brothers and sisters like they’re going to worship Krishna in a slightly different way. They have different colors that they like, different ways of doing ritual worship. But both Krishna and Kali, I mean Krishna and Kali maybe aren’t good examples because they’re very close to one another, especially in a place like Bengal. But say like Kali and, and ah, this is hard because yeah, I think all the tantric deities are so closely related that tantra cannot be confined to any one tradition. Everyone recognizes that their unique deity though is an expression of the same deity. And that’s the water of the ocean. So while the waves might all appear different to suit my temperament, the water is the same. And that water has this innate desire to arise as waves.

Rick  Light that is one, though the lamps be many.

Nish  Yes.

Rick  To quote The Incredible String Band. They’re before your time. Here’s a question for you. You know how some people say, I guess perhaps referencing, I know I’m going to get them, perhaps referencing quantum mechanics that a thing doesn’t actually come into existence until someone perceives it, right? Now, but if you think about that, alright, it was a few billion years at the very least before the universe was habitable enough for there to be, living beings that could perceive anything. You know, so it seems like a kind of dog chasing its own tail thing. How did the universe come into existence if there was no one to perceive it? But if we think of these deities as intrinsic to the fundamental nature of creation and as impulses of that field, then they were there from the very beginning to perceive and thereby to facilitate the manifestation of everything that came about.

Nish  Yes, it’s true. There’s a beautiful Kamalakanta song where he says, “Oh mother, where didst thou get thy garland of skulls before the universe was made?” What a beautiful song. He’s implying that yes, Ma was there. She’s Adya Shakti, primordial creatrix, and she was there prior to the existence of the universe. What was she doing? She was dancing in the cremation ground, howling madly with joy.

Rick  Leftover skulls from the previous creation, maybe.

Nish  Exactly, yes, probably. Sri Ramakrishna would use exactly that metaphor. He would say something like, “At the end of this creation, Mother gathers all of this up and puts it in a little bag. And then from that bag, she takes it out again and creates this entire universe.” But yes, I think tantra, very simply put, is this. It’s deity yoga. What a deity is will, of course, differ from tradition to tradition. So this is a very deep and profound conversation, of course. But I think different people have a different idea as to what deity really means. But I think deity yoga is common to all tantric traditions. So you get a deity, typically you choose one and then you approach a teacher who can give you that deity’s mantra or you approach a teacher who then assesses you and then prescribes a deity for you. So the role of the teacher, above all in the tantric world is to give you mantra diksha. Diksha means initiation. That’s another thing I should have mentioned actually as long as we have guru yoga then then the emphasis is not only on the Guru, but on this procedure called initiation. So the Guru gives you Diksha, and the main form of that Diksha is the imparting of a mantra. Of course, there are many kinds of Diksha. You know, you can be enlightened through a glance from the teacher. It’s called Chakshu Diksha, or a teacher could smack you on the shoulder and you could have an experience. That’s called Sparsha Diksha. But basically Diksha, Kriyavati Diksha, means you sit down with the teacher, they do a ceremony, they invoke the presence of that deity, and then they whisper into your left ear, and you’re familiar with this, being part of the TM tradition. whisper into your ear a particular mantra. But that mantra will not only have a beej mantra, but it will probably also have the deity’s name. So now you have this mantra and your job now from this point on is to establish a close personal relationship with that deity. Maybe you think of that deity as your mother. As in my case, I think of Kali as my mother. Or you think of that deity as your guru or your sister or as your friend. That’s another I think very unique thing in Hinduism if we may call it that. Approaching God through all these different bhavas. God is my mother, God is my friend or God is my lover. As in the case of Krishna Radha, a very difficult bhava to practice but one of the various bhavas. Then you do puja. The guru will teach you how to worship that deity every day. So you have a daily ritual practice. You offer flowers and incense and fire. Depending on the tradition this could look differently. And then after you do puja, the next thing you have to do is called japa. So you sit there and you repeat the mantra of that deity. And then of course Dhyana, you visualize the name and the form of that deity in your heart. And ultimately, you become one with the deity. So this is, Tibetan yoga really stresses this. Deity yoga is all about identifying with the deity and losing yourself to the deity. So at the end of the day, you forget that this is your body, it becomes deity’s body. It’s like a moth going into flame. It’s not that you’re appropriating the deity into your personality. A lot of people do that these days. It’s like, I’m Kali. I’m like, “Aray, what do you mean you’re Kali? You can’t even digest dairy and you’re claiming like you’re the god. It’s not quite like that. It’s not like you’re bringing the deity down to your level. It’s more the opposite. You’re eating food that was offered to the deity. Thereby, when you eat, you think of the deity. Before you go to sleep, you say your mantra and you dream of the deity. All day long, you’re repeating the deity’s name. And when you say the deity’s name, you naturally think of the deity’s form. And it’s like before you know it, you’re obsessed. Your whole life is nothing but Kali, Kali, Kali, Kali. And in that fervor, in that madness, you forget all about yourself. Renunciation comes spontaneously to one who is in love. The body is forgotten, the mind is forgotten, the world is forgotten. All that’s left is Kali. I sometimes think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings saying that all you can see is the Great Eye. Like that. All you can see is that ring of fire. Kali, Kali, Kali. So you lose yourself in Kali. And then you become one with Kali. That’s the way deity yoga works. By repeating the deity’s name, you become one with the deity. And then arguably, from there you go even further. From the deity which is the personal aspect of God, you enter into the impersonal aspect of God, which you cannot get to directly.

Rick  Good. A few questions came in. Let me do it. The first is from my friend Vaidi Nathan who lives up in San Jose. If you’re ever up that way you should meet him. I’ll connect you. The question is comparing Shaiva Siddhanta and Kashmiri Shaivism. Shaiva Siddhanta has been there for thousands of years from, through [Thiru]Moolaar and other Siddhas who are from B.C. I’m not sure what B.C. is, but Abhinavagupta, founder of Kashmir Shaivism, is recent and only… Oh, I see. B.C. meaning before Christ. Abhinavagupta is recent and only A.D., but they’re similar. Do you think Kashmir Shaivism is derived from or took roots from Shaiva Siddhanta, and what are the differences between them?

Nish  Yes, without a doubt. I think once, See, Swami Sarvapriyanandaji is one of the most important mentors in my life, of course, next to my Guru. Another very important mentor in my life is Sthaneshwar Timalsina, and I would sit with him, in his living room and I would ask questions like this about Shaivism in the North, Shaivism in the South, Shaivism of the present, Shaivism of the past. And it seems like Shaivism as a whole is quite cohesive and quite unified, you know. So like Northern Shaivas, like the Shaivas in Kashmir, and Southern Shaivas, like the Shaivas in Tamil Nadu, the kind of Shaivism I grew up in, there’s a lot of coherence. In fact, there’s an author, his name is Madhuraja. He composed a beautiful hymn to Abhinavagupta describing Abhinavagupta. Some claim Madhuraja never met Abhinavagupta. Madhuraja of course lived in a temple in Madurai Meenakshi. He lived in southern India. Some claim he walked up north to Kashmir and he met Abhinavagupta and then composed this wonderful hymn. In any case, Madhuraja is a a very unique figure because he represents the reconciling of North and South, Northern Kashmir Shaivism with Southern Tamil Shaivism. There’s figures like that, Madhuraja. There was also a very important figure in Maheshvarananda. He was a priest in the temple at Chidambaram, a famous temple to Lord Shiva, the temple of the dancing Shiva. And there’s a beautiful story. One day he was dozing off after performing a puja and suddenly he had the vision of the divine goddess Kali. And the goddess held up seven fingers and he received this powerful transmission. When he woke up, he then composed the text in 77 verses called the Mahartha Manjari and that’s one of the most important texts about Kali ever written. It’s a philosophical, exegetical work of course, but it’s about Kali worship. So a lot of the texts like the Kali worship text, we call the Mahartha or Mahanaya text, many of them are to be found in the south. Kerala is another center of goddess worship and you’ll see that there’s, geographically in India there’s a lot of similarities between north and south. So Abhinava Gupta, yes he existed later on in the classical tantric period, late 10th century, early 12th century and of course Thirumoolar and a lot of the Tamil Shaivas are ancient. They existed a long time ago but you’ll notice that Shaivism is not temporal. The teachings of Lord Shiva are eternal and the five heads of Lord Shiva are always issuing forth the Shaiva Agamas in each and every moment. Om Namah Shivaya Satatam, Panchakritya vidhayine, Chidananda ghana svatma, Paramathava bhasine Lord Shiva, Satatam, always in each and every moment, is revealing the Shaiva Agama. So I think when we talk about Shaivism we can put all temporality and geography aside. The Shaiva Agamas, the tradition is one tradition and it’s cohesive all throughout.

Rick  Okay good. Next question.

Nish  Yes.

Rick  This is, oh you remember Laura who asked a question a little while ago? She said she’s practicing Kriya Yoga.

Nish  Oh beautiful, beautiful! Yes and maybe you have a Kriya Yoga guru but you know Mahabavatar Babaji he’s very much in Shaivism we call him a Siddha, a being who just materializes. So Matsyendranath, Goraknath, these are Siddhas and it’s true Kriya Yoga is in the wider umbrella of Raja Yoga or the Yoga world which is very much closely related to Shaivism and one thing you might note is that Kriya Yoga is much broader than just self-realization fellowship. That’s of course one movement within the Kriya Yoga tradition. But there’s like lots of different traditions. You know, Sri Yukteswarji had different disciples besides Swami Yogananda Giri, Paramahansa Dev. There are many other disciples too and Yukteswar Giri was a friend of Swami Brahmananda and Sri Yoganandaji met actually M, the recorder of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita. So it’s kind of interesting that those worlds actually do combine. But yes, wonderful. It’s a wonderful tradition. It’s a yogic tradition, a mystical tradition, and therefore it does put emphasis on mystical experience.

Rick  Well, Laura, check out my interview with Philip Weber about a month ago. He was primarily in the Yogananda tradition, but he’s a little bit eclectic, but he’s had some really lovely experiences and awakenings, and he’d probably be happy to have a phone or YouTube chat with you. What was that thing called? WhatsApp, that’s what I’m trying to think of.

Nish  Oh yes, I’m reminded though, the reason I brought up Sthaneshwar Timhalsinaji is because once he gave a course on foundational Shaivism and the choice of text I thought was stunning. He chose Shiva Jnana Bodha[m], which is actually a text in Tamil, which has a Sanskrit form of course, and he chose the Shiva Sutra. So he took Vasu Gupta’s text, which is from Kashmir, and he took Shiva Jnana Bodha, which is from Southern India, and he taught a course on Shaivism using those two texts to show that Shaivism goes beyond all temporality and beyond all geography. Yes, I just wanted to point that out. That’s why I brought him up.

Rick  Okay, next question is from my friend Chitra Polanski in Sacramento. There’s a presumption in this question that you might not cop to. She said, “When you realized the self, did the world vanish?”

Nish  Ah, that’s an interesting question. See, in my tradition, in the Ramakrishna Vivekananda lineage, the realization of the self is in a sense equated with Nirvikalpa Samadhi. So yes, in a sense, when you realize the self, it’s in the context of that Samadhi in which one forgets about the body and in which one forgets about the mind. See, the world is nothing but an experience of embodiment. If I don’t feel my body, if I’m not seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching, what to say of the world? I won’t feel anything. I won’t know what room I’m in. The world will vanish. But of course there’s also a mental world and the mental world is where we experience the forms of gods and goddesses. We have all sorts of exciting spiritual experiences in this like dreamlike dimension. But even that disappears in Nirvikalpa Samadhi. The mind is extinguished and in that moment, in that Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the Yoga Sutra says “Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam”. “In that” – “Tada”. And then “drashtuh” the drashta, the seer, “abides” – “avastha”, “in her true nature” – “svarupa”. So with response to your question, when one realizes the self, it’s often in Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Of course, I know most of the Advaita Vedantins, you know, those who are in the Neo-Advaita camp will certainly disagree with this. They think you can realize Brahman like now itself, you know, without needing to go to Nirvikalpa Samadhi. But I think in our lineage, it’s a very yogic Vedantic lineage. We do say yes, when you realize the self, it’s probably because of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. It’s probably in a time when the world vanishes. But you know what? You come out of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. And when you come out of Nirvikalpa Samadhi and you experience the world, it’s with new eyes. And then you’re constantly communing with the self, now appearing as a table, now appearing as a chair. And just very briefly, there’s a good example that might help you out with this. Let’s say a child has never before seen a movie screen. And so his father takes him to the theater and they’re watching the movie. Now they arrive late. And so the movie is well underway by the time the boy gets there. And then the boy asked the father, “Dad, where’s the movie screen?” And the father points and he says, “Over there.” Now let’s say it’s a World War II film and the boy looks to where the dad’s pointing and he thinks, “The soldier is the movie screen?” And the dad says, “No, no, no, behind the soldier is the movie screen.” And the boy looks and he says, “The tank is the movie screen?” “Behind that!” “The mountain is the movie screen?” “Aray!” “No, behind that!” “Oh, the sky is the movie screen!” Now the father is at a loss. Everything that he points at is some object in the movie. So he says, “No, the whole thing.” So the boy thinks, “Oh, everything together is the movie screen.” “Not quite!” So there is no movie screen. Not quite. You see, in the dad’s predicament, there’s nothing the dad can do to show the boy the movie screen. The boy has never seen a movie screen except to turn off the movie. If they had come before the movie or if they stuck around after the movie, it’s only then that the boy will see the movie screen. You know, it’s possible for the boy to intuit the existence of the movie screen while the movie is running, but it’s probably better for the boy to just see the screen without the movie. That’s called Nirvikalpa Samadhi. That’s the realization of the self.

Rick  Yeah, I have a question related to this. Swami Sarvapriyananda often seems to say that maintaining samadhi, that according to Patanjali, maintaining samadhi requires keeping the senses withdrawn, eyes closed, and I always counter, I usually send him an email after I hear him say this, that that’s just an initial condition but through regular exposure to that it gets stabilized and integrated so that it will be maintained even in the midst of activities, like dyeing a cloth yellow by dipping it in dye and then bleaching it in the Sun and dipping it and bleaching it back and forth until it’s colorfast no matter whether it’s in the Sun or the dye and that’s my take and to whatever extent my experience.

Nish  There’s a verse in Pratyabhijna Hridaya Sutra where Kshemaraja says, it’s like when you’re in Nirvikalpa Samadhi, “Vyutthāne Bhuyas Bhuyas”, you slowly emerge from Nirvikalpa Samadhi and you maintain that fragrance. He calls it cidaikyāmarśātChid, the sense of the oneness of all things. And then with your eyes open, you never quite forget that fragrance. And so you’re right. It’s a matter of constant immersion. That’s why I like your dying the cloth metaphor a lot. Sri Ramakrishna would joke. He would say, what? You put God in the prison of Samadhi and then threw away the key. And then in Tripura Rahasya, there’s this man who goes into Samadhi and his wife says, “Wait, wait, wait!” He first, he experiences Nirvikalpa Samadhi, he opens his eyes, he looks around and then he hurriedly closes them again. Because it’s true in Patanjali he does say, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah” it’s the cessation of the mind. So all senses are shut down, the mind is turned off, you’re in samadhi. And in texts like Jeevan Mukti Viveka, it’s true. It seems like the longer you can stay in samadhi the better. So anyway in this text, the man looks around and he closes his eyes again and his wife says, “Wait, wait, wait, please tell me, my husband, what have you gained by closing your eyes? What have you lost by opening them? ” It’s a very remarkable statement. And then she goes on to say that you can have this eyes-open Samadhi, Sahaja Samadhi. And so Shri Ramakrishna, he would go into Samadhi a lot. The slightest mention of God would cause his mind to soar and he would enter into Samadhi and he would be lost in Samadhi, and then he would come out and he would stutter a little bit like a drunk person. And then he would usually have to manufacture some desire. He would say, prepare for me a smoke or give me a glass of water or something. He would need something to bring his mind down. He wouldn’t actually have to drink the water or smoke the hubble bubble. It was enough to simply just manufacture a desire and with that desire the mind would come down and then he would speak and when he would speak his voice would be charged with the power of Samadhi. So he was somebody who would frequently go into Samadhi, frequently come out, frequently go into Samadhi, frequently come out. Whereas Holy Mother, she was someone who was never seen to go into Samadhi. Rarely would anybody catch her in like a spiritually abstracted state. So arguably she maintained the constant experience of Samadhi like an undercurrent, even as she went about doing the various duties that she had. So I think you’re right. It is perfectly possible post-Samadhi to maintain that fragrance. It’s called maybe Sahaja Samadhi or some eyes-open type of Samadhi, to constantly be interfacing with God even with your eyes open.

Rick  One would hope. I mean, otherwise it seems very tenuous, very intermittent. You can bet that when Ramakrishna had his eyes open and was talking to people he wasn’t in ordinary humdrum state of consciousness. We would be quite blown away if we could step into his body and experience things as he was experiencing them at that time.

Nish  Yes it’s true and in India they break these bricks and using the brick dust with lime they make steps and then they also make roofs. So Sri Ramakrishna would say when you climb the steps and you get to the roof you then realize that the material of the roof, brick and lime dust, is the same material as the steps. So having gone beyond the world, you realize God, you come back to see that the world is nothing but God. So Sri Ramakrishna would say it’s all rushed, soaked in consciousness. So this is what you’re describing as a post-Samadhi experience, of maintaining Samadhi even with the eyes open. Sri Ramakrishna might call something like that Vijnana, you know, something greater than just Jnana. Jnana you get in Samadhi, but Vijnana you get with your eyes open, interfacing. So I think it is possible and desirable and I think it’s a goal actually.

Rick  I think this actually pertains to our previous discussion also about direct and progressive paths because you can directly go into samadhi on day one of your spiritual practice but that, but it’s going to then integrate and stabilize over years and decades.

Nish  Yes true, true. You do.

Rick  Repeated exposure.

Nish  Yes repeated exposure. I think you’re right. Repeated immersion.

Rick  Yeah.

Nish  It is repeated exposure therapy with Samadhi. Beautiful questions.

Rick  Some more questions coming in here. This is from Tree Wiseblood who was my previous interviewee the week just before you. She’s in Australia. She says, “I have many of the deities dancing in my body. What is happening here? What are they doing?” You know, in the Shaiva Sutra there are words like Khechari and Bhuchari. One thing about Tantra is everything in the body is deified. So for instance Kali has 15 attendants. They’re called the Nitya Kalis and each of these goddesses are corresponded to some aspect of embodiment. For instance the five organs of action, the legs, the hands, the organ of evacuation, the organ of reproduction and the organ of speech. Each of these are seen to be in and of themselves goddesses. or the organ of smelling, of tasting, of seeing, of touching, of hearing. These are all goddesses. And the five pranas that flow through the body, the downward moving prana, apana-vayu, the outward moving prana, prana-vayu. So inhaling and exhaling are movements of the goddess. That samana vayu, the breath retention, or even Kundalini Shakti of course, the goddess Kundalini racing up the Sushumna nadi is a goddess. And then of course vyana vayu, the goddess that you know what you’re describing as eyes open samadhi is this pervasion, dhyana, the pervasion of divinity in all things. These are all goddesses. So the five organs of action, the five organs of perception, and the five pranas, they make up 15. And how many attendants does Kali have? 15. Isn’t that so beautiful?

Rick  Yeah.

Nish  Or like there are eight petals in the yantra. The eight petals sometimes refer to the eight aesthetic flavors like anger, or like disgust, or like fear, or like arousal, or like laughter. So in tantra the goal is to divinize the body, to see every process that happens in the body as a movement in the, as a stirring of consciousness. So I think, what’s happening? What’s happening is that you’re getting a better grasp of reality, that everything that happens in the body is sacred and divine. Goddesses dancing.

Rick  I like that and again if we think of goddesses and gods as impulses of intelligence, there are all kinds of… I mean, the human body is just like this miraculous display of intelligence on every level.

Nish  I love that phrase, Rickji, “impulses of intelligence”. Beautiful. What is the body but a series of impulses of intelligence? And what is a goddess but that?

Rick  Right, right. Okay, let’s see here.

Nish  Can I make a quick interjection just so I ask a final question before we run into Q&A about the dark side of tantra. I noticed…

Rick  Oh yeah, yeah, we’re going to talk about that.

Nish  I’ll quickly say something. In the West, when you say tantra, or more commonly tantra, what people are thinking about is sex.

Rick  Right.

Nish  Like tantra in the West is usually a fixation on sexuality, and that’s not wrong. I mean, I think there are a lot of things that call themselves tantra, maybe neo-tantra, just like there’s neo-vedanta, there’s neo-tantra. There’s one who just says tantra. To distinguish tantra from the California brand of it, she calls one tantra and the other tantra. So this tantra, I’m not saying it’s without its value, I’m sure it’s helping many couples find greater intimacy and whatnot. I’m sure that’s, as a standalone tradition, very valuable. It’s just tantra is itself not really interested in sex as an ends. There are forms of tantra, certainly, like vamachara tantra, where sexuality and sex is divinized and ritualized. So for instance, in chapter 29 of Abhinava Gupta’s magnum opus Tantraloka, he describes the Adi Yaga or the Kaula ritual in which one enters into the ritual space with, usually one’s wife, almost always is it’s one’s wife or one’s husband, and the two of them enter into a meditative state in which one partner identifies as Shiva and the other partner identifies as Shakti and they do actually participate in a ritualized sex act. That happens. That’s definitely part of the tantric world, right? And that’s supposed to create a sudden explosion of Kundalini Shakti. So the purpose of that ritual, very importantly I have to stress this, is not pleasure actually. The purpose of that ritual is to use the primordial forces of arousal and sexuality and harness that and redirect that for a spiritual outcome. So sex is not so much villainized in Tantra as it is in other traditions Tantra is a much more body-positive, Siddhi-positive, sex-positive tradition. but always with a spiritual view in end. So in the West, any tradition aimed at maximizing pleasure or increasing the number of orgasms you’re having or something like that, that’s fine. It’s just not tantra. Tantra is about going beyond the body and going beyond the mind. Albeit, it allows the body and mind to be seen as vehicles. So sexuality then can be harnessed. Sri Ramakrishna would say, “Why would you want to overcome your sexuality?” Redirect it towards God. That’s the idea. If you’re angry, if you’re aroused, whatever, that’s free energy. Tantra is about capitalizing on that energy and getting beyond it ultimately. That’s one thing. In the east it’s black magic. So the west when they hear tantra they think sex. In the east when they hear tantra they think black magic. And that’s certainly part of the tradition too. There are people who go to the cremation ground and then tie a string around a crow and then sacrifice that crow into the funeral pyre in order to like hex their enemy. This is called abhichara. Abhichara means to stun your enemy, to kill your enemy, to have someone fall in love with you. That’s also part part of the tantric world and worshipping goddesses like Bhagalamukhi, like the Daksha Mahavidya tradition, there’s a reputation in these traditions for doing Abhichara, for doing “black magic”. So I think it’s good to be as inclusive as possible. It’s good to say that tantra has high and low, pure and impure, and ultimately all can be seen as part of the same tradition. I think Abhichara is fine. I think the crazy sex stuff is fine too, because it’s helping someone, somewhere. So I’ll just close it with Vivekananda’s famous statement. He said in America when he first gave lectures here in Chicago, he said, “In Hinduism,” I’m going to paraphrase a bit, “the lowest fetishism and the highest absolutism are seen as valid attempts to grasp the ineffable.” So I think yes, there is a dark side and by dark side, I mean a ritualistic black magic, like indulging the senses side tantra. And I don’t think we as a tradition ought to reject that as “not tantra.” It’s certainly part of tantra. But it’s a great tragedy, I think, to think that tantra is just that. Tantra is so much more.

Rick  Right, it’s just a small percentage, I imagine, if you really understood the whole of tantra.

Nish  Yeah, yeah. Most tantrikas would not be engaging in wine drinking or ritual sex acts or black magic or things of that nature. Most tantrikas wouldn’t be even remotely interested in that.

Rick  Yeah. Okay, let’s see here what we got. This one is from Prem Vishwanathan in Boston. How is tantra different from bhakti yoga? If tantra is ritualistic worship of a deity, can that be categorized as a form of bhakti?

Nish  A very, very beautiful question. In fact, a lot of bhakti yoga is tantricized. Tantra does not actually presuppose bhakti, but it is a form of deity yoga, like I mentioned earlier. So it’s a ritual form, right? So like you get puja from your guru, you learn how to do ritual for the deity, but it doesn’t presuppose that you love the deity, it’s enough for you to do the rituals. So tantra, many people have argued, has more to do with yoga and with jnana than with bhakti. It’s not really about loving the deity as much as it is in performing rituals and doing the practices which of course ultimately culminate in genuine love for the deity. Whereas bhakti traditions sometimes are anti-ritual. There are many bhakti traditions, like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu famously would say, no times are set, no rites are needed for the chanting of thy name, so vast is thy mercy. So there are a lot of like bhakti teachers that are trying to go beyond ritual, that are speaking out against ritual and in doing so are distinguishing themselves from the tantric tradition which for the most part is very ritualistic. Vaidi Deva asked earlier about Shaiva Siddhanta. Shaiva Siddhanta is the foundations of all Tantra and of course Kashmir Shaivism would not exist without the foundations of Shaiva Siddhanta. Everything we know about Shaivism rests upon this Shaiva Siddhanta ritual technology and ritual world. So in a sense, Bhakti can be seen as a stand-alone tradition for that reason, because it rejects ritualism in some of its forms. But over time, the use of puja, the use of japa, the use of mantra became inalienable aspects of bhakti, such that nowadays tantra and bhakti are almost indistinguishable. So I think it’s fair to say that tantra is the means for bhakti yoga, where, in bhakti yoga, you get a deity from your guru, and then you use the practices that emerge from the tantric world. Practices like puja, japa, practices like even kirtan in a sense is a kind of mantra yoga. Those practices are tantric in nature, they evolved out of the tantric worldview. But the goal, the end goal in bhakti is devotion to God. See, bhakti is special in that way because that’s the end goal. Whereas in tantra, I think its end goal is not necessarily just to love God, its end goal might be to become God, which I think many bhakti traditions would not be comfortable with.

Rick  Yeah, they want to keep tasting the sugar.

Nish  Yes. And I will say, Sri Ramakrishna often stressed, he would say, “Bhakti is the one essential thing.” And he is a master tantric, right? He mastered the 64 Bhairava Agamas. He was a worshipper of the divine goddess Kali. He was very well versed in puja. But his main form of sadhana was just crying out to God with a yearning heart. Vyakulata, parama vyakulata, intense yearning for God. That’s a bhakti approach. So in bhakti, if you have strong yearning, just deep love for God, that alone is sufficient. so bhakti, you can think of bhakti as a kind of super tantra maybe. Tantra is the way to get bhakti.

Rick  One of the titles of one of your videos was “The Danger of Non-Duality – Ashtavakra Gita”. Now I know Ashtavakra and Mandukya Upanishad are very world negating, you know, nothing ever happened and nothing ever existed and all that stuff. Are you implying that by your title that there that would perhaps be a dangerous attitude to culture for most people, especially householders?

Nish  Yes, I don’t think it’s so much that I love our Ajata Vada and I think householders can also benefit from it because if they knew the world was nothing but a dream, nothing but an appearance with no basis in reality, I think that would help a lot of householders actually. I think that would help them be better householders. They would take everything less seriously. Janaka, Ashtavaka’s student in that text is himself a householder and not just any householder, he’s a king with all these responsibilities and he doesn’t give them up. He continues to be a king even in light of his realization which came from Ashtavaka in that Gita. So anyway, I think it’s not so much that seeing the world as a dream is dangerous. I think in that lecture I was specifically pointing out the risk of spiritual bypassing or there’s this hasty conclusion that people make after they read the Mandukya Upanishad and they study Gowdapada’s commentary. After they study Ashtavakra Gita, they usually become like so condescending towards deity yoga. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t need to do puja. I don’t need to do japa. Why should I have love for any form of the divine? The world is not real. I don’t have to do any spiritual practices.” So I think it’s the danger that I was pointing out there is the danger of undigested jnana or direct path without any supportive, progressive path disciplines. Typically, I see a lot of people reading Ashtavakra Gita who have no foundations in spirituality whatsoever. like they get turned on to the text and they’re intellectually stimulated by the text, but they’re not doing daily meditation or doing puja or anything like that. So I think that’s the danger I pointed out. Ashtavakra is a high level text, you know, like even Dzogchen or Mahamudra, that’s something that’s only revealed after a lot of ethical and meditative training within Buddhism. And most of the people practicing Dzogchen are monks and have been monks since they were children. So there’s a big danger in starting from the top at the very beginning without the foundations. That’s, I think, what I was pointing out in that lecture.

Rick  Okay, good point. Yeah, and I mean, some of these Neo-Advaita teachers actually follow this logic. They say, “Okay, the world is an illusion. You don’t exist. Therefore, don’t bother doing spiritual practices because those are only going to reinforce the notion of a practicer.” So, you’re already enlightened, you’re done. Basically, I know, come next week and I’ll tell you that again.

Nish  And you know what? In some cases, that might be true. There are some people, it’s called Anupaya. Abhinav says there are some people who just hear it once and they’re free.

Rick  Very rare.

Nish  It’s very rare. Yeah, it’s such a minority. And so I do really, I love that direct path teachers are trying their luck. Maybe someone in that big hall will be an Anupaya qualifier. And they hear that, and it’s true. It’s actually true for them. They do experience the benefits of their realization and they for the rest of their life, they’re free. And as Ashtavakra says so provocatively,”Sukhamchara, Sukhamchara!”, they just wander about the world happily. But for you, you’re right, you’re right. For the vast majority of people, they’ll hear that and they’ll need to hear it next week and they’ll need to hear it like sweet next week and the high will only last until they get to the parking lot and when they’re pulling out of the little conference center and someone cuts them off in traffic, all the ajata vada goes away. So the realization is not the problem. The realization is wonderful. The problem is that because of that realization and because of, you’re right, a lot of direct path teachers discouraging practice, the danger is this kind of spiritual bypassing where we don’t actually do the work and therefore we don’t actually benefit from the realization. And you know, I mean, direct path teachers, a lot of them were speaking out against practice as a way for, you know, because it’s true, practice will reify the idea of the practicing subject, but they themselves have done a lot of practice. That’s one thing they don’t often tell their students.

Rick  True. Yeah. A couple of years ago, I interviewed a woman named Jessica Eve. People can find her if they look on Batgap and she’s become a kind of a clearing house for neo-Advaita brainwrecks. People who just got really into the whole thing and began to lose interest in their families and their jobs and to become nihilistic and to become depressed, even suicidal. And there’s several other people who are doing this now, too. There’s a woman in Germany who’s, I’ve seen her talk, having conversations with Tim Freke, who just feel like it’s been very, I think, that overemphasis on jnana yoga is, or a lot or a sort of a primary focus on jnana yoga is probably most suitable for recluses.

Nish  Yes.

Rick  You know, and if householders do it, and especially if they’re focusing on knowledge that says, you know, you don’t exist, the world isn’t real, so on and so forth, I think it can make one kind of nihilistic. I mean, your child gets cancer and what do you say, oh well, the world is is an illusion.

Nish  I mean yeah you know Swami Vivekananda says it best he says it’s not good to be one-sided and this model of the four yogas is very helpful because you’re right if we’re very very developed in one yoga and we forget about the other three often we can become unbalanced. There’s a Swami in Providence, Swami Yogatmananda ji, he makes a joke he says if you do too much jnana you become stony – cold and dry and holistic. If you do too much bhakti yoga you become shaky, overly sentimental. If you do too much Raja Yoga, you become spooky, because you’re so ungrounded because of all these mystical experiences. And if you do too much Karma Yoga, you become shady, because you’re always asking for donations for your new school or something. If you practice Karma Yoga, you become stony, shaky, spooky, and shady.

Rick  My friend Steve in Santa Monica that I’ve referenced, he called me today and the first thing he said was, “What do you think?” He said, “Do you think that on the whole, worldwide, is spirituality doing more harm than good?” And we got into an hour and a half conversation about it, and my conclusion is that if it is approached in a holistic way, where all the different aspects of life are cultured, you get exercise, you have proper relationships, you eat properly, you engage in meditation, study, you know all the different things, then you can have a balanced development that is very good for you and your contribution to the world will be good. But if as you were saying, the Swami in Providence, if you focus in an imbalanced way on one or another aspect, it can throw your whole life out of whack, and then perhaps it’s not good for you or the world.

Nish  Yes, it’s true to be balanced and to be integrated I think is… the Ramakrishna mission. Their goal is really the four yogas ought to be developed alongside one another because they’re mutually enforcing and out of the understanding that we as human beings are not just cognitive beings which I think has been the hyper-emphasized aspect of our personality since the dawning of the internet age because so much of our life is in the head. We’re just on Reddit or we’re on Discord like talking to people and getting disconnected from the rest of us and so we’re we’re not just cognitive beings, we’re also affective beings. We have a heart and we have a desire to act. We’re active beings and we’re conative beings. So the four yogas meet us where we are. Gyana yoga for the cognitive aspect. And of course, Bhakti yoga for the affective aspect, Karma yoga for the active aspect and Raja yoga. one of my personal favorites, of course, for the conative aspect.

Rick  What’s that word? Codative?

Nish  Conative, like to will.

Rick  Cognitive? Not cognitive.

Nish  C-O-N-A-T-I-V-E, Conative.

Rick  Conative. I hadn’t heard that word.

Nish  Willing aspect. Because it’s true. Yoga is really an act of concentration, keeping the mind fixed on, let’s say, the breath or like whatever else you’re meditating on. And that’s a kind of muscle unto itself. It’s like a specific part of the mind, arguably, willing. And see, a lot of Jnanis, they read a lot of Ashtavakra Gita, but their willpower is very weak. So they’ll continue to indulge in activities, even after they realize that it’s not real, they’ll still plunge headfirst into that indulgence. Why? Because they cannot wheel themselves away from it. if they don’t have that vairagya, why don’t they have the vairagya? Because they don’t have the willpower and Raja Yoga will develop that willpower, that psychic strength. And some people are jnanis but they’re so sad and so sorrowful and that’s because their life is not filled with song and devotion and the ecstasy of bhakti yoga. And a lot of them can be very ungrounded and very reclusive because they’re not plunging into the realm of activity and serving others. Because if it’s, if it’s true that only Brahman exists, then Brahman is appearing as all of this. And if I’m going to eat, if I’m feeding this illusory body, shouldn’t I also feed every other illusory body that appears around me? I should go out and feed and volunteer and help people. So it’s only when we have all the four yogas cooking at the same time that the meal is really tasty. Swamiji said, “I give you dry hard reason, jnana yoga, softened in the syrup of bhakti, made spicy through karma and cooked in the kitchen of raja yoga.

Rick  Very good. Yeah. Okay, so that’s a really good takeaway point and perhaps it will be a closing point unless we think of something else. But just that if you’re a spiritual aspirant, try to cover all the bases.

Nish  And in fact, that’s fun, right? It’s just more exciting to do that.

Rick  Yeah. And that’s not to say that you will become a dilettante, a superficial dabbler, like that old saying, you dig one deep well rather than 10 shallow wells. But another way of looking at it is use maybe 10 different tools to dig the one deep well. You need a pickaxe, you need a shovel, you need a jackhammer, you need all kinds of different things.

Nish  And you’re actually making, you’re raising a really important point here. The four yogas will only really work, I think, if you have this understanding that it’s the same hole and these are distinct tools for digging the same hole. Because if you think the God of bhakti and the the God of jnana are different gods then you will feel a kind of tension because you’ll study ashtavakra and you think “oh God is impersonal, God is absolute. In fact i won’t even say God anymore. I’ll say Self.” Then you come to bhakti and it’s all hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare you might get the sense that like okay well that personal god, that god with attributes that i’m praying to is different from the Self that the Upanishads talk about and if you have that sense then the four yogas, you’re right, will be like digging four shallow holes but if you know and if you understand that the formless is the form, that the absolute impersonal is now appearing as Kali, if you know that the person that you’re serving is none other than Kali embodied, and if you know that in meditation your goal is to reconcile all of this, then the four yogas will feel like different tools digging the same hole. You’ll feel like each of them is giving you the same joy and each of them is mutually enforcing one another in the path of spiritual progress.

Rick  Yeah, and another thing you said a minute ago which I really liked is that we have different faculties, we have an intellect, we have a heart, we have organs of action, we have organs of perception and so you know why just develop one to the exclusion of the other?

Nish  Yes, yes that’s the tantric idea too. The body is real, the mind is real, the human personality is real. So tantra seeks not to overcome the human personality but to transform it and so there must be practices for the body, for the mind, for the prana and for the ego. In fact, Kundalini, as Swami Vimalananda, not Swami, Vimalanandaji, the Agora trilogy is about this very powerful Aghori named Vimalananda and Robert Swoboda. I think someone who, if you haven’t interviewed him yet, you have to.

Rick  I have.

Nish  You have? I’m a big fan. I think he’s such a great voice in this world of tantra because the tantra that he learned from Vimalananda Ji is that Aghora Tantra, that Vamachara Tantra that is often so misunderstood and misrepresented. So he’s pivotal I think in clearing up our tradition. Vimalananda was deeply devoted to Ramakrishna. A lot of the things that Vimalananda says are very aligned with what Ramakrishna says. and so he saw Ramakrishna as the perfect ideal. And so Vimalananda, I keep saying Swami Vimalananda because he has a Swami name, but he’s a household name. Vimalananda Ji, he teaches about the Kundalini in a very unique way. He says it’s ahamkara actually, ego, kundalini, that power within us, which is the heart of tantra arguably, kauliki visarga shakti, the goddess that runs the body, which Abhinava Gupta describes as a streak of lightning, vidyuleka vilasini, playful and beautiful, that goddess who abides in the body of the dancing Shiva, that kundalini is nothing but personality. So, when we come into the world of tantra, it’s a practice of personality transformation. Right now I think I’m this little mind and body. So Kundalini is dormant, it’s sleeping because it’s identified with this limited Jiva. And Tantra is the journey from Jiva to Shiva, the journey from the Muladhara Chakra to the Sahasrara Chakra and then back. It’s a hero’s journey. So that transformation of personality is actually very important. So Advaita Vedanta sometimes when it’s taught in a neo-Advaitic way can reject the person. “I’m not a person.” I mean, after all, reality is impersonal. “So I’m not a person” “I have no body” “I have no mind” And that’s kind of bypassing. In Tantra, we acknowledge the person. I am a person. I am this Jiva called Nish. And the journey now is to transform that Jiva into Shiva, to become a God person. Actually Tantra is all about getting the Divya Deha or the Vajra Deha, the lightning body or the divine body. The body should be full of prana and full of power and refining the mind so it’s clear and lucid and most of all transforming the personality so that it becomes divine, veritably God on earth.

Rick  That’s great. I’ll let you have the last word. That’s a really good closing point. Because we could go on for the next 20 days.

Nish  Nicely done.

Rick  So, I’ll say it again to those listening, where do you do these classes? Are they on Patreon or on YouTube?

Nish  Most of them are all just on Zoom. Anybody can come. The big satsang, the one that most people attend, is Monday nights at 7pm Pacific, and it’s just a Zoom link. It’s totally free. Anybody can come. Then we meet again at 10am Pacific on Friday morning, just to be inclusive to our EU and Indian satsang, because of course they can’t make the evening times. And then we do it again Friday at 6pm Pacific. So these are just our satsangs, they’re free and open to the public. But yes of course, all the videos from there, many of them we put on YouTube, some we put in podcast form, and if anybody wanted to come live, they could of course be part of the Discord, and they could of course join us on Patreon, and of course thank you for all your contributions, But really, it’s just freely open to the public and anyone and everyone is welcome.

Rick  That’s great. Well, I’ll make sure that I have proper links to all that on your BatGap page and links to your website, which I imagine gives people a window into all those different things.

Nish  Good.

Rick  So it’s great getting to know you, Nish, and I hope we stay in touch.

Nish  Yeah, Rick ji, that was so much fun. Thank you so much for having me. I greatly enjoyed our conversation. And you’re right, we could just go on and on and on.

Rick  Yeah. Okay, and so thank you very much and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. And my next interview is with another young guy. How old are you now? 25 or so?

Nish  28.

Rick  28. Yeah, next one is another young guy in Denmark that Irene discovered who seems very… it’s like I mostly interview older people, you know, but old white dudes. But it’s really good to sort of see, I mean, to tune into someone like yourself, who is the hope of the future, really. I mean, you and others like you. It’s encouraging, it’s inspiring, and it’s reassuring to know that there are young people who are so ardent in their spiritual development and so advanced in their understanding already at your young age. That’s impressive. I mean I remember I was 28 I didn’t think I was that young anymore but it seems young to me now.

Nish  Yeah well I mean thank you so much for the chance Rick ji. Thank you for giving me the space to share these views and my deep pranam to Ireneji. Just convey my pranams to her and of course to the rest of your household. May Divine Mother Kali bless all with health and prosperity and with light and love and renunciation.

Rick  Thank you. Alrighty and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. We’ll see you for the next one.

Nish  Har Har Mahadev.

Rick  Thank you.