Paul Muller-Ortega Transcript

Paul Muller-Ortega Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 415 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu where you’ll see all the previous ones organized in several different ways. This whole program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers whom we very much appreciate, so if you would like to support it in any way, there’s a donate button on every page of the site. My guest today is Paul Muller-Ortega. I first heard about Paul on the Spirit Matters Talk podcast that my friends Philip Goldberg and Dennis Raimondi do and he sounded very intriguing, but they only do half an hour. I’m going to do two hours with him. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience going back 50 years of study in this lifetime and I think that a lot is going to be covered in this interview and people will find it very interesting. So, a couple, a little bit about him and then you can read a more detailed biography on my site or his site which is bluethroatyoga.com. Paul is recognized internationally as one of the world’s most highly respected and renowned academic scholars in the field of Indian religion and Hindu Tantra. He is the founder of Blue Throat Yoga which teaches the Svatantra philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism along with the practice of Neelakantha meditation. For nearly 50 years Paul has been a pioneer in the technology of consciousness, lecturing and teaching about meditation and Indian philosophy to hundreds of thousands of people in North and South America, Europe, and India. So again, there’s a lot more about Paul if you want to read his full bio on his website or on his page on batgap.com. Blue Throat Yoga, so probably many listeners will be familiar with the idea that Shiva is depicted as having a blue throat because he drank some poison to protect … yeah, I don’t even remember the whole story, I’m sure Paul can tell us, but I guess that’s how you got that name.

Paul: Yes, Neelakantha, his throat is striped and stained by the potency of this poison. It’s a long myth, I won’t tell the whole structure of it, but basically the Devas and the Asuras, the gods and the demons, are churning the ocean of milk and what they’re after is Amrita, the nectar of immortality. So they have this cooperative … usually they are great antagonists, but here they are cooperating. They turn a mountain upside down, they wrap a serpent around the mountain and they create this churn, and all kinds of amazing things come out. And for me this churning of the ocean of milk is an extraordinarily beautiful mythic metaphor for the whole process of yogic sadhana. There’s a churning of consciousness, many different things emerge in the story, the nine-trunked Airavata, albino elephant, this huge gem, the goddess Sri, all these things. But then at a certain moment poison begins to emerge and it surfaces as this black, icky, gross kind of stuff. And Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu, who are overseeing the whole matter, basically don’t know what to do so they call Lord Shiva. He comes in the form of the Mantra, actually he’s called the Mantra Murti, and he sits at the edge of this ocean of milk, puts his left hand into it and the poison starts to rise up his hand into his mouth and he holds it in his throat. And we know that in what’s really a much later chakra system, the throat chakra is called Vishuddha, which has to do with purification. So the transmutational purification of this poison, which is really symbolic of all of the negative karmas that are said to constitute the agonies of humanity, in a certain sense, that are being churned out of and being released in this way. And he holds it in his throat and it stains his throat blue. And this is a very, very old myth, it’s already present in the text of the Sri Rudram, which is at least 2000, if not much older than that. As a text it’s one of the great famous appellations or sacred names of Lord Shiva, Neelakantha. There are many other references to his throat in this way, and this idea of almost like a radioactive cobalt blue intensity of energy that represents the transmutation of this negative karma into something that is actually nectarian in its character. So the myth or the metaphor of alchemy and of alchemical transmutation is part of what’s indicated here. And it’s also the connection of the throat to the mantra, the saying of the mantra, obviously at different levels of speech, etc. and so on. So it’s always been an intriguing name for me. When I retired from the University in 2009, I taught for many years at the University of Rochester in New York and began to teach, I thought, “Well, this is a beautiful name, let me take this, Neelakantha, Lord Blue Throat.

Rick: I’m sure that we could spend a whole interview just talking about what you just said. I seem to remember somebody once asking Maharishi Mahesh Yogi about why the gods and demons are always fighting, depicted as fighting or competing in these ancient texts, and he said something about, you know, it kind of keeps the creation manifest, that polarity.

Paul: Keeps the story going.

Rick: Yeah, like otherwise the whole thing would just sort of collapse.

Paul: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: Alright, so Kashmir Shaivism and Tantra, maybe explain those two terms a little bit and what they’re all about.

Paul: So basically, of course, the term Tantra is a huge term and there are actually many different traditions, not just in the so-called Hindu or South Asian world, but also in Buddhism. There’s a Jaina Tantra, there’s a Vaishnava Tantra, and so on. So Tantra encompasses many, many different traditions and is defined quite variously and differently in all of these different traditions. Within the stream of traditions associated with Lord Shiva, the Shaiva traditions, that begin to emerge in a series of texts known as the Agamas and Tantras, which are revealed scriptures that parallel the authority of the Veda at a much later period of time. So starting at around the 3rd century approximately of the Common Era, these texts begin to appear which are not considered to be of human origin and which begin to teach a series of teachings about a tradition that has a great variety of names. One of them is this term Svatantriya, which means freedom, and it’s sometimes called the Svatantriya Vada, the teaching or the philosophy of the ultimate freedom of consciousness itself. And it’s most likely, I mean it’s a sort of a scholarly argument, where does Tantra come from? But it’s most likely that Tantra originates in these texts of the Shaiva Tantric tradition and then it spreads and changes and transmutes as it moves into other settings. In the context of the Shaiva Tantric tradition, these texts are about fundamentally, I mean they’re fundamentally about a very delimited number of things. They are about consciousness and they teach the nature of the absolute consciousness known in the first one of the root texts of this tradition, which is called the Shiva Sutras, is called Chaitanyam, the great absolute consciousness and the nature of that consciousness. They’re about the wisdom of the knowledge of that consciousness and within that then obviously they offer sadhanas, various different kinds of initiatory practices, as well as many rituals, as well as a whole system of daily life, etc. and so on. And from these Agamas and Tantras then there evolves a series of great masters who begin to write and comment on the teachings of these. Probably the greatest of them is a medieval teacher who lived most of his life in Srinagar in Kashmir in the 10th to 11th century whose name was Abhinavagupta. His title was Rajanaka Abhinavagupta and he was just the most extraordinary, prolific, and exquisite author who wrote voluminously many, many different texts about this tradition. And some of the themes that he talked about there are obviously different forms of the Shakti of the Goddess, the understanding of the Goddess at the highest level of consciousness not on a ritual level, not even on a deity level, but the understanding of the potency of consciousness as understood in terms of a great variety of Goddesses. Some of the earliest philosophical writings about Goddess Kali, for example, appear in this text, other Goddesses, the Goddess Para, who is the embodiment of the supreme word of consciousness. Within these texts also we get the really exquisite and very sophisticated teachings with regard to what is called Matrika Shakti, which is really the teaching of the nature of language and of the impulses of consciousness that create the structures of language and of knowledge in a very, very beautiful array that parallels the structure of Sanskrit itself. And so from this then, there are two branches. One is obviously the understanding of ordinary conventional language, how does language function, the communication of meaning between human beings, but then also the whole topic of mantra. And really, these texts are among the most sophisticated and precise texts where in very great technical detail the teachings of mantra are investigated in a very, very beautiful and profound way. Abhinavagupta himself, in many of his masterworks, goes into great detail with regard to the nature of mantra, what is a mantra, how do we understand mantra, the functionality of mantra, etc. and so on. So really they could be called mantra sastra or systematic knowledge with regard to mantra. And then within that they offer the Shaiva tantric texts of Kashmir Shaivism, offer what I would call a philosophy of refinement, in which the Sanskrit term is samskara, not in the meaning of the traces of past action, but samskara in the sense of the refinement of life. How is life to be refined such that it yields higher and higher values of existence. And so there’s a very, very beautiful set of teachings with regard to the refinement of the mind, the refinement of thought, the refinement of the breath, the refinement of the senses, the refinement of speech, the refinement of action, etc. and so on. It’s very, very beautiful teachings. And all of these then center on, I mean I have to backtrack a little bit to talk about it. It is a tradition, it is a non-dual tradition that however is mostly, although not exclusively, centered on householder practitioners. And I’ll talk about that more in a little detail. Now one of the things that happens historically is that this tradition gets lost. There are many, many reasons for this. One is, sort of, the initiatory lineages just trail off as Islam begins to come into Kashmir with the movement of the whole Mughal Empire and so on into Kashmir. Then the support, the term Rajanaka, which was Abhinavagupta’s title, it was a hereditary title actually means one who is a Brahmin who is supported by the Maharaja. It’s a very, very interesting term. That support vanishes and so clearly these extraordinary scholarly and also extraordinary learned but also enlightened masters lose the, we could call the cultural and even economic context for their life and it doesn’t become possible for the tradition. So within about 200 years of Abhinavagupta’s life, the tradition dies out almost entirely in the north of India. And previous to that, it has spread throughout all of India and the influence and the impact of these writings and of these texts is to be found all over in many different places and libraries in India find the texts of this tradition are there. But as a living initiatory esoteric lineage, set of lineage streams, the so-called Kashmir Shaiva, which is really a modern term, not very precise term, it has some problems, but disappears really. And what happens is the texts of the various branches, the various schools within so-called Kashmir Shaivism are preserved in manuscript form in Srinagar and really they’re copied and recopied and preserved as treasures but really there’s very little understanding of the actual practice and we don’t have knowledge of any other masters in this tradition until the 20th century. And in the early 20th century, the Maharaja of Kashmir finances a research project for the publication of these texts and over the course of about 30 years his small research department is called in Srinagar, begins to publish, starting around 1918 into the 1930s and 40s prior to World War II, and these books are then sent out to a variety of universities around the world where most of them sort of languish in deep storage, etc. and so on. My own encounter with all of this was when I was in graduate school in 1973, my teacher in graduate school, Jerry Larson, who’s an extraordinary scholar of yoga, just an exquisite professor, I was very lucky to have him as a teacher. We were in, I don’t know, it was like third or fourth year of Sanskrit, went over to the library of the university and he showed us these 72 more volumes of the Kashmir series of texts and studies, as it’s called. He is a scholar, he’s still writing and producing his scholarship, though retired from the university. Jerry is a scholar of classical yoga, Patanjali yoga, and classical Samkhya, but he was interested in the teachings of the 25 tattvas or principles, reality principles, in Samkhya and where we get different versions of that. And one of the different versions we find are the 36 tattvas in the classical teachings of the so-called Kashmir Shaiva tradition. So anyway, long story short, that’s where I was first introduced to this tradition in graduate school, and I’ve been pretty much fixated and fascinated and obsessed with it ever since. Now obviously Tantra is, I mean, for many, many years I was a member of a small scholarly group that’s still in existence, I don’t attend the meetings anymore, the Society for Tantric Studies, and pretty much, I would say, the first five years of our meetings, what we did was argue about the meaning of Tantra. It’s not an easy thing to define. But in the context of the Shaiva Tantra tradition, Tantra is the systematic science, the chit shakti vidya, it is the wisdom or the systematic knowledge of the potency of consciousness. It is about mantra sastra, about this extraordinary technology of mantra in very acute and refined detail, very, very beautiful teachings there. It’s about refinement and it also offers an esoteric path for householders that is non-dual. And historically what happens is that the non-dual tradition that sort of wins the day historically in India is of course Vedanta, particularly Advaita Vedanta, which is a renunciatory tradition. And one of the things that’s been lost, it’s recovered now, but historically was that there was a parallel tradition, which was this tradition of the so-called Kashmir Shaiva tradition, which was a non-dual tradition for householders, for householder practitioners, that was a parallel path, and that that parallel path for householders was lost in a certain sense, or at least it was lost from public view. Obviously there are always the stewards and the guardians behind the scenes and the teachers and so on who are maintaining these things in some way or another, but in terms of a widespread knowledge of Abhinavagupta, the predecessor teachers of Abhinavagupta who start out with these great teachers Vasugupta, Samananda, Utpaladeva these extraordinary masters who write these exquisite texts and so on, and then subsequent, after Abhinavagupta, there are several other teachers Seemaraja is one of the most famous ones who composes a text known as the Heart of Recognition, Pratyabhijnahrdayam. But basically the teachings of these masters are lost from view in a more widespread way, and with that the understanding that there is any such thing as a path to ultimate attainment that does not involve renunciation or the process of becoming a Sannyasi formally in that way was also something that was lost. And I think that one of the things that happens in popular culture and even today in the widespread marketplace of spirituality, of yoga and so on, is that spirituality is still primarily understood almost exclusively in terms of renunciation and in terms of renunciatory practices and the idea that there is any such thing as a parallel path that involves householder practice. We’re not talking about householder dharma and so on, this is something else. This is the esoteric path of ultimate realization walked by householders, which is very different in its character, extremely different in its character, from the renunciatory path and obviously offers then a whole different set of … so I think this is one of the things that’s fascinated me, is that how to investigate this tradition and what it offers and how it brings this understanding in this way. And of course there’s much more to say about all of this.

Rick: Okay, I probably had about a dozen questions come to mind while you were saying all that, but I’ll try to stick to the ones that come to the front of the queue in my mind. One is of course that … well, first of all, most of my audience are not going to be scholarly people like you are, academicians, but they’re all spiritual aspirants of various stripes. And as you well know, I’m sure, the word Tantra to most people implies great sex. And it’s interesting that you mentioned that the Kashmir Shaivism tradition offers something for householders that’s on a parallel track but different than the Advaita tradition, because most people who are into spirituality these days, or a great many of them, are big fans of Ramana Maharshi. And of course many of them are from Papaji’s lineage, if you call that a lineage, and he was Ramana Maharshi’s disciple but was not himself a householder. And yet there’s still a fairly strong renunciate flavor, if you read a lot of Ramana Maharshi’s works and all, and I think that kind of filters down into people’s thinking and expectations and feeling like, you know, and their interpretation of what spirituality is supposed to be all about. So that gives you a springboard to just comment on those few points, just about where the sexuality aspect of Tantra fits into the whole picture, and this sort of emphasis on, perhaps an implicit emphasis if you read a lot of Ramana, on a renunciate viewpoint, which might actually not be the most suitable thing for many of the people reading it.

Paul: Well, exactly. I mean, you’ve hit it exactly on the head, Rick. These are some of the concerns and some of the confusions and some of the ways in which there are sort of ambiguities between all of these things. One of the ways that I talk about it, and I’ll come to the topic of sexuality in a moment, but one of the ways that I talk about it in terms of, you know, we have this sort of fundamental metaphor of the ocean of consciousness and then a wave on the ocean of consciousness. And this is a traditional Nyaya or illustrative example from the Shaiva tradition where they talk about the great ocean rising up in waves. Why does it rise up in waves? Well, because it is its inherent nature, its swabhavata, the inherent nature of the ocean is to rise up in waves. Now the question is, once that individual life wave, and those waves obviously represent us, individuals, once the life wave rises, the Shaiva tradition says what happens is that the wave forgets its oceanic character, and they have a whole set of teachings with regard to why it is that that forgetfulness happens, etc. and so on. Then there is, and I can go into that later if you want, but then there is a whole set of teachings with regard to Upaya, as it’s called. Abhinavagupta brings forward the method. He says, “How is it that having forgotten that oceanic totality of consciousness we can recover that oceanic totality?” He says, “Upaya.” Now within that then he offers …

Rick: Which means “skillful means,” right?

Paul: It means “method.”

Rick: Method.

Paul: Yeah, “skillful means” is the translation usually in Buddhist texts. Whether it’s method or sets of practices, and he offers actually four different Upayas in his teachings. It’s really fascinating, the richness of his teaching isn’t just to offer one path or set of methods, he offers actually four, and we can look at that also if you want to. However the point I’m coming to is to say, within that, in the application of method or practice to the life wave, there are two different directions. One is that says, “Now that wave has risen and therefore it must subside.” So the way for the wave to recapture its oceanic totality is to subside as an individual wave. And in fact, renunciatory practice, as we say even in the Yoga Sutra, right at the beginning the whole notion of nirodha, the cessation of the activity of the awareness, chitta vritti nirodha is the definition of yoga. And this has all been understood in terms of saying, the individual life wave has to subside, not only must it subside, it must be negated, annihilated, and completely stopped, so that all that’s left is oceanic in its character. And there’s a whole set that, if one looks at renunciatory practice and one realizes it’s about annihilation, it’s about the annihilation of any separateness. It’s also about the annihilation or the uprooting of any form of impulse of desire, any agenda toward action, any form of investment within the relative structure of reality it’s the dissolution of all of that. Now the Kashmir Shaiva tradition offers a very different perspective on this metaphor. It says, look, it’s actually very different, it’s the exact opposite. The life wave must be involved in a set of methods or practices, a variety of different terms that are used for this, by means of which the individual draws from that oceanic totality at its base, to cause the wave to rise higher and higher and higher and higher, and so that eventually the entire ocean will rise up into an individual wave, and therefore it’s a very different perspective. So I talk about the life wave amplification and refinement, so it isn’t just about drawing something, but it also has to be refined, it has to be continuously refined through a series of stages in the journey of consciousness. And that is exactly, it’s 180 degrees opposite in terms of the directionality of practice that’s involved. It’s not about, also, it’s not about the negation or the eradication of all impulses toward investment in action. It is about the purification, if you want to use that term, or the dissolving or negating of life-damaging impulses, but it’s actually about the investment and fulfillment of those impulses or agendas of life that rise up within the individual. So the empowerment of desires, as it were, not desire just in the sense of sexual desire, but any form of investment towards life, any form of creativity, any form of action, and so on. How is it that those impulses and agendas of life can best be fulfilled, and that a set of practices by means of which that is being supported, rather than the notion in the renunciatory path is the eradication, it’s really the deracination, it’s pulling everything up by its root so there’s nothing left of any separate impulse. And it’s renunciatory practice, if practiced authentically, and renunciatory practices and paths are exquisite, they are very beautiful. The question is, most people don’t find them suitable for life. It’s what is compatible with life, this is the issue. So what was lost then was this non-dual, householder, non-renunciatory set of practices and initiatory paths and esoteric teachings and so on, within which then what was happening was not the eradication of separateness, but rather the drawing at the base and the rising up, in the Sanskrit term Venugopal uses, “Purna Ahanta,” the perfectly fulfilled, great “I am” consciousness, so there is this rising and rising and rising. And then he has a map, it’s a very interesting map that’s interesting to look at, with regard to stages on that journey, various levels of the rising of consciousness toward higher and higher stages. So it’s not about a single stage, it’s a multi-tiered kind of map, it’s also very interesting.

Rick: So what you just said about the rising of the wave, the whole ocean rising in a wave, I presume that you’re implying, correct me if I’m wrong, that not only…well, I was kind of reminded of all these verses in the Gita, like, you know, “Establish in yoga, perform action,” or “Yoga is skill in action,” and things like that. And the emphasis being that enlightenment is not merely about renunciation, but actually can be a tremendous boon in terms of more effectiveness in the world, not renunciation in the world, but actually being more … accomplish more in the world. And that’s not incompatible. So it’s there in the traditional Hindu texts, but then Shankara’s lineage was all renunciates and it probably got swept under the rug, you know, that was the implication of spiritual development for the vast majority of people.

Paul: Yeah, yes, and I think … it’s complex, it’s obviously a long history that spans at least a thousand years, if not more, of various kinds of evolutions. One of the fascinating details within all of that is that one of the places actually where the Tantric tradition survives is actually in the very center of the Shankarite orders, the mathas of Shankara, as the later form of Goddess-centered Sri Vidya, where the practice of Sri Vidya becomes the esoteric practice of the monastics and so on. But it is kept as the most secret teaching or the most restricted teaching in that way. And so, I mean, it’s quite complicated and I’m sort of painting with a broad brush here, but it’s one of the places where the Tantra actually survives is there. But generally speaking, this idea of a householder esoteric path that is non-dual in its character has been lost, and it’s been lost from view. And part of what the … I think that over the last hundred years or so, the recovery of a somewhat lost tradition of so-called Kashmir Shaivism has been a … it’s a collective enterprise, obviously it’s not any one individual, but there’s been an interesting emergence, if you will, of this tradition and of its teachings and of the writings of its masters and so on, that offers us a very different picture and a very different perspective and something that’s very … it’s actually interestingly modern in a certain way. It’s interestingly compatible with the aspirations of many people in our modern world, where people are not necessarily all flocking to become renunciates and so on.

Rick: To say the least, yeah. In fact, I try to keep my audience in mind during these interviews and one bias or opinion that I often hear aired is that all this stuff about gods and goddesses and all the trappings of the Hindu tradition, the Vedic tradition, seem like so much diversity to people, especially if they’ve been reading a lot of Ramana and they think it’s all dualistic, all that stuff. Why don’t we just cut to the chase and there’s only one reality and we shouldn’t get hung up in all these details and so on, and so address that doubt.

Paul: Well, I mean, I think it’s also a question of taste, of what … I mean, the spiritual path many times responds to what we come into this life, and what people’s tastes are, what their previous experience is, what they gravitate toward, what form or … like Joseph Campbell talked about the masks of God, what mask of reality is appealing to us in a certain kind of way. That’s part of what, in the Hindu tradition, they talk about the Ishta-Devata, the desired form of the deity that speaks to you most powerfully, is the form of reality that you can most easily approach that’s closest to your heart in that way. And I think that there’s no question that one of the boons of this time is the almost infinite variety of different paths that are available. The downside of that boon, obviously, is a tremendous amount of confusion with regard to aspects of all of this, but nevertheless, yes, it is clear that the conventional Hindu religion, to separate conventional Hindu religion, which obviously has many different sampradayas or groupings within it, does focus on a great variety of different deities, different faces, different forms, different approaches, rituals, temples, festivals, holy days, etc. and so on. Clearly within that, however, even in the earliest teachings there’s a notion that says there’s 33 million faces of God and there’s only one Tad Ekam there’s only that one. And this is also very, very powerfully taught in the higher esoteric teachings of the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, where there is the notion of the one great unitary light of consciousness, the Mahaprakasha, which then appears in so many different ways. Just like within that light all the different colors of the rainbow can appear, so too the diversity of forms and shapes and faces and murtis, as it were, that can appear, but that all of them are really aspects or dimensions, facets or values of that ultimate reality that then are highlighted in a certain kind of way. And there is a utility to highlighting the different kinds of shakti as we explore our own life and explore our own life, our path, what are the various forms of the potency of consciousness. We talk about the potency of consciousness, the potency of bliss, the potency of will, the potency of knowledge, the potency of action. These different forms are very important to understand and really show us details and technicalities of specificities of pathways, as it were, that are necessary for us, they provide the vocabulary for understanding a lot of this.

Rick: Yeah, so a couple of themes here I want to bring in. I’ll read a couple of quotes from you in order to introduce them. One is the sort of progressive nature of spiritual development and the other is the two-step process of knowledge and experience. So regarding the progressive nature, here’s a quote, “It is only through repeated inquiry, prolonged contemplation and a continuous process of returning to themes, concepts and understandings over time that we truly refine, advance and penetrate into the deep marrow of what is conveyed in a revelatory text such as the Shiva Sutras.” And here’s another quote, “The notion of vikalpa samskara, the progressive refinement of understanding, is presented by the great mahasiddha Abhinavagupta in the Tantraloka.” So a lot of people take exception with that kind of notion. They say, again, they say, “Cut to the chase, realize that you’re that.” All this notion of a progressive path, ongoing refinement and development is just going to keep you chasing the dangling carrot, you know, always looking for something over the next horizon, you’re never going to arrive. So how do you reconcile that objection with what I just read?

Paul: Right. Well, I mean, this is where, before I was referring to Abhinavagupta offering the four upayas, and he talks about four different methods, and these are gradated understandings of spiritual paths. He does speak almost immediately, this is in his massive work called the Tantraloka, light on the tantras, which is an extraordinary, huge commentary on these revealed scriptures of the tantras and agamas of the Shaiva tradition. Almost immediately he wants to say there is the unupaya, which is the non-method method, in which the only thing that is operative is grace, there is no path, there is no mantra, there is no initiation, there is no progress, there is no transformation. It is instantaneous in its character and really relies on no form of effort or action or investment of the individual.

Rick: And to what percentage of people do you feel that that pertains?

Paul: Well, that’s the issue, exactly. He himself says it’s a pretty small club, it’s like membership in this club is pretty small. He wants to account for the fact that … you see, he’s speaking about the freedom, the Svatantriya of reality, and he says reality is so free that if it “wants to” it can liberate someone instantaneously, even if they’re not a good person, it has nothing to do with their karma in a certain way, they could be potentially instantaneously liberated. And he does make a place for that, and he says, yes, there is that notion of the instantaneously liberated masters or masters who even are born enlightened the janma siddhas as they’re called, they’re born already liberated, already free, do not have to walk any form of progressive path or whatever. He says, however, if that is not the case for you as an individual, then there is clearly something that needs to transpire. And the inquiry then is the inquiry into what is that something that must transpire? And basically in a lot of different places, and this goes back also to the teachings of one of the great tantra texts, the most extraordinary text called the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, which is one of these tantras that’s entirely devoted to meditation, where it says, “Look, any notion of approach to the non-dual has instantaneously invoked duality.” The moment that you talk about non-duality and then you say, “Now I’m going to move toward that or enter into that,” or whatever, you have posited instantaneously duality in that moment. And the question is, how do you overcome that? How do you overcome that paradox? It says, “Yes, you can say everything is one, there’s only one thing, immediately enter into that.” And Abhinavagupta says, “Yes, for some people that happens spontaneously, automatically, effortlessly, without any form of investment, initiation, teachings, path, nothing, it just happens for them. That’s great, it happens, it does happen. But for the rest of us, for whom that has not happened in that way, then there is the notion that says, “Well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do?”

Rick: This brings up a question that I often run into, which is that a lot of people read a bunch of books and they say, “Yeah, I get it, it’s all non-dual,” and then they kind of assume that that intellectual understanding is what these books are talking about. They don’t realize that they’re mistaking an understanding for the experience that the books are referring to. So there’s a second point I wanted to raise with you, which is about the Jnana-Vijnana, “Neither experience nor understanding alone truly suffice for the growth of true wisdom on the spiritual path.” They’re like two legs that you need to walk on, both should develop a pace.

Paul: Exactly, exactly. It’s an extraordinary teaching. It’s right at the beginning of Abhinavagupta’s masterwork, the Tantraloka, he offers this understanding, he says, “There’s two kinds of ignorance and there’s two kinds of knowledge that overcome that ignorance, and therefore they need to be both worked on. On the one hand you have what he calls “padusha” or so-called “spiritual ignorance,” which is the absence of the knowledge of the transcendental self experientially. And then there’s “bhauda,” which is the absence of the correct or highest or most liberative understanding with regard to that ultimate reality. And he says, “You could have one or the other, but you need both of them actually, both of them need to be there.” And that what often happens, and something I talk about a lot in my own teaching, is that there’s a lag between … people have experiences, but there’s a lag in terms of their understanding of what those experiences mean, signify, convey, or the import or the true value of them, and that in that differential between their depth of spiritual immersion into reality in a certain way, but then the continuation of the animation of superficial or inadequate ways of thinking about all that conceptualizing, they perpetuate then a form of ignorance for themselves. It’s only when … so therefore, Abinavagupta’s teaching of the Kalpa Samskara, which he mentioned before, the refinement of conceptualization, says, “Yes, there must be a set of practices by means of which there is immersion in ultimacy.” One of the terms he uses is “hridaya vishranti,” reposing in the great heart of the Absolute, a set of practices that take us there. And by the way, the teaching with that says, “Shaivi mukham ihocyate,” in Sanskrit, which means, “Here, in this tradition, it is the Shakti that functions as the doorway or access point to that ultimacy. One cannot approach that ultimacy directly, says the tradition. One must have the intermediary of the Shakti, hence the extraordinary focus on the different kinds of Shakti in this tradition. The Shakti creates the pathway or the access gate or the means to enter into that. But having entered into that, then the question is, how is the person still thinking about the whole thing? How are they understanding it? And in many cases there’s a perpetuation of very limited understanding, fallacious or incomplete or unrefined knowledge with regard to it. And hence, for this tradition it is just as important to have the experiential immersion in ultimacy, in absoluteness, and the digestion and the continuous steeping and dying of the cloth of consciousness in that, as there is the notion of the process of refining how we’re thinking about it, and having our mind and our understanding catch up with what is already taking place. And that’s the process of the Kalpasamkhara, that says, “Look, your mind ordinarily is going to animate limited knowledge.” The Shiva Sutra, the famous root text of the tradition, says, “Nyanam Bandha,” “limited knowledge” is one of the definitions of bondage. What is bondage? Bondage is limited knowledge. It’s not the complete absence of knowledge, it is a knowledge that is inadequate, crude or superficial, incomplete, insufficiently refined, potent and aligned with or in sort of congruent, smooth coherence with the ultimate reality itself. And therefore, that process of the refinement of understanding, the refinement of conceptualization, is just as important in this tradition as the process by means of which there is the continuous immersion in that vastness or spaciousness of consciousness itself. That’s jnana-vijnana, the intellectual knowledge and the experiential knowledge, he says, are they mutually nourish and feed each other. This is right at the beginning of the Tantraloka and eventually as both of them mature and grow over time. And yes, there is this alternation. As our experience grows, so too does our capacity to understand even the teachings of the tradition, the words of the great masters, etc. and so on. It is only as the inner eye of experience is opened that we can actually really even register the nuanced subtleties and in-depth precisions of what is being contained in this teaching. So you’re absolutely right, just reading a book and saying, “Oh yeah, well I’m cool with that, yeah, non-duality is my bag, my philosophy,” and so on. It’s like that’s just, you know, I mean that’s great, it’s a first start, it’s a laudable enthusiasm, but it is not really the nature of realization itself in that way.

Rick: Yeah, and on the flip side, I’ve interviewed people whom I think have a very profound and genuine degree of awakening, of experience, but their interpretation of it, and then many of them become teachers and get up in front of audiences and start promulgating this understanding, I think is very half-baked and I think it confuses people. And many of them, well many of them … not only are they espousing some understanding which I think is limited or erroneous, at least in my opinion, but they may not be offering any actual prescription for developing the sort of experience they are having. And so people sit there and they get kind of uplifted and inspired by what they’re hearing and they kind of resonate while they’re sitting there, but I don’t really know how productive it is.

Paul: Well exactly, I mean I couldn’t agree with you more, exactly, it’s very well said, you know, this is the issue. And therefore, I think that we’re in a phase in which we are maturing very rapidly with regard to our understanding of overall maps of spirituality, maps of enlightenment, and different models of practice and of schools of practice and teachers and so on. It’s an extraordinary process of transmission that’s been happening to the West for the last 150 years, if we want to think of it in terms of some great wave of an awakening or dawning time, etc. and so on. But that even, I mean, many times people trace it back and say, “Well, Swami Vivekananda at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 comes to Chicago and it’s really the beginning of an extraordinary wave of teachers and teachings, not just in the Hindu tradition, we know in the Buddhist tradition, practically every esoteric tradition that has ever existed on planet Earth has been poured out for inspection and visibility and a certain kind of revival at the current period of time. And there’s a sort of evolutionary process of maturation within all of these different traditions and schools, growing up to more sophisticated, more refined, and more adapted to, I mean, Abhinavagupta talks about this at great length in his writings, and he says, “You know, even if there is” he talks about it, he calls it the “Samsitika Guru,” that teacher who has so spontaneously awakened, he says, “initiated by the very potencies of his or her own consciousness, that master has risen to the highest enlightenment,” and it’s really considered to be the epitome of the highest kind of teacher, the Samsitika Guru. However, he says, “Even the Samsitika Guru, if they really want to present themselves as most highly authoritative, will submit to an initiatory process of studying the teachings of the tradition at length, imbibing those teachings, considering them at length, and then receiving the term he uses in Sanskrit is the “sattaraka,” the rising up from the inside of waves of spontaneous insight into the deepest purport or meaning of these revealed scriptures and of the teachings of the great masters and so on. And that only then, he says, “then there is a teacher that could be called equal to Bhairava.” Bhairava is the form of Shiva that is most worshipped in this Shaiva tradition. “Then they truly can be said to become Bhairavas.” And so there’s a responsibility to, however much there’s a freedom and a feeling you know, when I was a university professor we used to read William James in theories of religion classes and so on, and James talks about how mystical experience is self-validating. It has this quality of when it rises up inside you that you feel that it is true and that there’s nothing in the outside world that can really counter that. That feeling of the self-validating nature of mystical experience, however, still the Shaiva tradition said, “Look, however much that’s your experience, you still need to practice in alignment with tradition. You need to practice in alignment with the teachings of the great teachers, the great texts, the great commentaries and so on, because there may be remnants of inaccuracy or superficiality, crudity of the sthula character in what you’re animating in your mind. The state may be very beautiful, but what is being animated in the understanding may still lag behind.” And that’s where then there’s work that needs to be done. It’s one of the reasons why, you know, it’s not that this tradition is intellectual, it’s a tradition that says you have to work on all of these different aspects on the spiritual path. You need to have profound sequences of ever-deepening immersion into that absoluteness and the digestion of that into a stabilizing state, rising towards higher states of consciousness. But at the same time, you can’t neglect the process of what your mind is thinking or understanding or conceiving around all this, and you can’t just lean back on the notion of, “Well, I know because I’ve had this as a mystical experience.” It has to be checked against tradition. And I think that if I have a purpose in terms of, I’ve wanted to bring out these texts on a scholarly level, and I’m still going to work the rest of my life to do it, so that they become available as sources for checking against a particularly highly refined and sophisticated esoteric tradition that can offer a kind of a mirror and also a safety check with regard to what it is that’s coming forward. And then also, there’s a completeness about it. Many times things are left out. When we have these experiences, many times the experiences arise in a particular avenue of life and then there are other aspects or dimensions of the whole matter that are not fully considered and that then need to be opened up and aerated.

Rick: Yeah, I kind of feel like for everybody who has a profound spiritual experience and whose understanding may not have caught up with it, there’s probably a hundred people who have a head full of understanding whose experience hasn’t caught up with it, and they probably need to get cracking on some kind of spiritual discipline, which we can talk about in a few minutes, but I also want to comment on what you just said in terms of … I mean, I’ve given talks about this and thought about this quite a lot, about the notion that, you know, I mean, whatever reality may be, you know, and there are all sorts of traditions that attempt to describe it, both spiritual traditions and scientific traditions, and they each have their own specialties. Biology doesn’t mess with what, I don’t know, geography is trying to do or quantum physics is trying to do. Oh, actually, that’s beginning to cross over, this quantum biology these days. But, however, I think the quest of science is to ultimately arrive at some kind of consensus understanding of the nature of reality, each branch of it contributing their own piece. And I would think that spirituality could and should aspire to the same thing, and there are so many traditions of that throughout the world, but really they’re all talking about the same reality ultimately, just coming at it from different traditions, different cultures, different ages. But then the two of those should be able to merge in some kind of grand unification. And you know, I can envision a society maybe a thousand years from now or whatever, in which the whole distinction between science and religion seems ludicrous, and that we’ve really kind of … we use subject and object of tools of gaining knowledge in harmony with one another to gain a complete understanding of the full range of reality, both the things that concrete material instruments can measure and the things that this more refined instrument called the human nervous system is uniquely qualified to measure.

Paul: Beautiful, yeah, exactly. I mean I couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly it. And the notion … I mean this is where Indian philosophy generally, in all of its different branches, talks about the pramanas, which are the modes or means of knowledge. So how do we know things, you see? And there are seven or eight or nine of them, depending on what different schools you look at, but basically it boils down to three. They say, “Look, we gain knowledge and life through our senses,” and that’s called pratyaksha, “through our very eyes.” What’s in front of our eyes, eyes is the master sense for all of the five senses. But we also gain knowledge through inference, anumana, which is to say we can infer from what we’re seeing and derive knowledge secondarily in that way. The famous example is what they call the invariable concomitants of fire and smoke. If you see the smoke at a distance but you can’t see the fire, you can infer the presence of the fire because fire and smoke always go together. And those two together, pratyaksha and anumana, really form the basis of the scientific method. I mean that’s what science uses as its tools. Obviously it wants to magnify the senses through instrumentation, it wants to magnify inference through theory, through mathematics, through various kinds of theoretical computational means and so on, but science in general is focused in that way. Now the tradition says, “Look, there’s another kind of knowledge, however, it’s called agama and it is of a very different character. It is the knowledge that reality has of itself spontaneously and automatically and the way that that knowledge reveals itself within human beings and that that knowledge is not able to be, as it were, collapsed down to the perceptual or inferential kinds of knowledge that are derived from the other pramanas and that most of so-called spirituality or spiritual paths then derive from a kind of knowledge that emerges spontaneously from reality itself and that has been transferred to individuals through extraordinary individuals themselves and that this then creates an extraordinary consideration as to how is it that using this instrument, you mentioned the nervous system, it’s a very beautiful phrase, the physical and subtle bodies, as it were, and their state, knowledge can begin to arise spontaneously from within and we as individuals can begin to serve as vehicles for the transmission of a knowledge that is not born of our surface intellect, that’s not born from our cleverness or intelligence or our accumulation of data or our inference around that, it is somehow this notion of something that emerges spontaneously from inside, fully formed and fully shaped. This is a practice and it receives a name, Abhinavagupta calls it bhavana, and bhavana then is this extraordinary counterpart to meditation. He says, “First you have to go within and clear the field of the buddhi, the pre-egoic awareness space of the debris accumulations of the negative samskaras that have accumulated there, there’s all kinds of junk inside us and it has to … there’s physical stuff but it’s also subtle body stuff that needs to be purified away. When the buddhi is rendered sufficiently sattvic, which is to say clear and luminous and irradiated, ignited with light, then that becomes an arena within which the individual embarks on an adventure of invoking sequences of insight.” And this is the most extraordinarily fascinating dimension of the Shaiva tradition where they say you practice Bhavana as a series of practices in which you begin to inquire at the very root of the relative sphere of reality, at the very doorway, as it were, of the Absolute. You place inquiries at that place and those inquiries will then shape themselves into sequences of responsive, structured insight that then rise through from the very subtle level, in terms of the vocabulary of the Tantra it’s called the paschanti, the visioning word, the word that is extraordinarily subtle, is then concretized and rises up to become the madhyama or intermediate dimension of thought and then that has to be articulated in terms of speech and the Vaikuti, the spoken word. And it’s almost this as a tool or an instrument for the investigation of reality that says, “We as human beings can serve as explorers of this ultimacy and that what can arise from that absoluteness is endless.” In other words, there’s no limit, there’s no boundary, there’s no certain set of structures of insight, there’s endless streaming of spontaneously shaping and spontaneously arising insight from within which is ever more refined in its character. This goes back to what we were talking about with regard to conceptualization, because if that insight is arising but then it rises through the level of the mind where the mind is jumbled and incoherent and filled with superficial or limited or contracted notions and ideas, then you’re filtering this very limpid stream through a kind of muddiness and then that’s what emerges in that way. So it’s a question of how do we sufficiently clear out the instrument of the human body and the subtle nervous system and so on, such that then individuals can serve as source points and transmission relay stations, in a certain sense, for these extraordinary impulses of the ultimate, absolute consciousness to rise within that. And this is the understanding, yes, it’s the understanding of great teachers, but eventually it has to be the understanding of the destiny of humanity. In other words, how do human beings really rise into a golden era? Only by having this independent, individual access to this ultimacy, not just in terms of the silence of transcendence into the absolute, but also in terms of being practiced and capable of receiving the streaming forth of these insights that then serve, really they serve to guide, they serve to orient, they serve to inform, they serve to inspire, they serve to also permit the shaping of any kind of degree of complexity of knowledge whatsoever. And that this is the way we understand it. So we say, “Well, the great masters had risen to that state, so they spoke from that dimension, this very limpid and clear level of their speech because they had cleared out.” And that the aspiration isn’t just to meet such a master, the aspiration ultimately is to become such a being where that process can arise, and that’s part of the vision of this tradition. So meditation and bhavana, this eliciting of sequences of spontaneous insight from within is very, very fascinating, and it’s a set of experiences. In other words, it happens and you begin to have spontaneous insight from inside, and then as the process of the clarification and the refinement of consciousness proceeds, so too, to an increasing, increasing degree, the ever more potent surging of different kinds of insights that then narrate, in a certain sense, the nature of reality, the nature of the absolute, the relationship of the absolute to the relative manifested structures, etc., and so on, and become the … so yeah, anyway. This is all … Abhinavagupta talks about this a thousand years ago in extraordinary detail is the point I’m trying to make. Fascinating to find this in his text.

Rick: Somebody sent me an interesting quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj the other day. He said this shortly before his death apparently. He said, “Forget I am that.” That was the title of a book of his sayings. He said, “I realize so much more since then. It’s so much deeper.”

Paul: I love it.

Rick: Which some people don’t like that notion because they’ve, like I said earlier, chasing the ever-dangling carrot, but I kind of love the notion of ever-never-ending exploration and unfoldment and refinement.

Paul: Beautiful, beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, I mean just … and actually I can’t say that I’ve ever met anyone who would be exempt from that possibility, you know, and I’ve met some pretty interesting people but I really feel like it’s a never-ending exploration. And if you read the sort of the traditional texts about the various lokas and the beings that are said to dwell there and all, you know, we’re kind of in kindergarten here, compared to what’s possible. While we’re on this topic of … you were talking about purification and I just want to read a question that came in from Raymond Schumann in Olympia, Washington. We were talking at the beginning about the blue throat thing and he said, “I read the story to mean that a seeker after enlightenment must swallow and metabolize all his personal shadow. He must also swallow his portion of the agony of creation.”

Paul: Beautiful.

Rick: Yeah, so …

Paul: Yeah, exactly, yeah, that’s well said. I couldn’t agree more. It’s exactly right.

Rick: Yeah, so I remember Margie’s talk about stress as being impurities in the system and you know structural and chemical abnormalities in the nervous system which needed to be purified, chemical repair, chemical purification. And these days the term neuroplasticity is popular. And somebody asked him one time, “What happens if we got rid of all of our stress, all of our individual stress?” He said, “Well, then you start taking on cosmic stress.” So you become a washing machine.

Paul: That’s right, exactly. And I think that, I mean, this is an old understanding obviously that says, “The presence of great masters on planet Earth has been possibly the salvation of the planet against annihilation.” That great beings, even in their silence, even beings who do not emerge to have a public teaching or agenda or whatever, that the extraordinary purificatory potency of great enlightened masters on the planet has served as a countervailing impulse against just the sheer, also, ocean of horribleness, as it were, that has been accumulated in that way.

Rick: Yeah, that brings up an exciting point. You know Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The next Buddha may be the Sangha,” and I think we’re at a … even though we’ve had the possibility of nuclear annihilation for half a century now, I think there are so many things now which have lined up to potentially kill us all, not only the nuclear but climate change and many, many other things. And I find it extremely exciting and significant that there seems to be some sort of epidemic of spiritual awakening taking place in the world, which is unprecedented in our memory, and that it might be just nature’s way of providing the antidote, although it’s not a done deal, but providing the potential antidote to some kind of really catastrophic thing.

Paul: Yes, and I mean I think that, you know, when I was talking before about waves of teachers, and I think at a certain moment, it’s not that the wave of teachers is going to necessarily stop, but it becomes more and more our responsibility. In other words, it isn’t just … in my own teaching about these things I talk about the difference between childhood, adolescent, and adult or grown-up spirituality, and the dependence of the child on the parents to solve all the problems, versus the grown-up that says, “Look, there aren’t any other grown-ups, we’re the grown-ups, we have to somehow take responsibility for these things, to continuously look to some salvific figure, some avatar figure, somebody who’s going to solve all the problems in that way. Maybe they’ll come, maybe they won’t, we don’t know. But in the meantime, we have to take responsibility.” And that’s also part of the understanding of householder spirituality. In other words, that householders are here to develop a radical degree of creativity inside ourselves, and that through that creativity there is the possibility then of manifesting better things for our planet, better structures of society, of economics, of education, of just getting along with each other, whatever it may be, the environment and so on. So that there’s this notion …

Rick: Alternative energy, all kinds of things.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. You know, that this whole process of Bhavana itself, that I just was talking about, is a kind of doorway into infinite possibilities of manifesting methods and practices and ways by means of which that creativity can be expressed. And it is an endless well, and it is our responsibility to tap into that, and that therefore it’s extraordinarily important that more and more of human beings, you talked about more and more people awakening, and we know, awakening is not the same as enlightened.

Rick: There are many degrees of it.

Paul: Exactly. So awakening has to be met with knowledge, it has to be met with practices, it has to be met with a vision of a path, a set of understandings, etc. and so on. And that that’s part of what’s taking place in a certain way right now. We say, waves of individuals awakening in all of these different traditions then, being met with understandings that will help to transform and shape life. And for me, this understanding of householder esoteric non-dual practice is very, very significant because it basically says, “How do you access the highest form of the potency of consciousness within yourself and how do you express that?” You were talking about yoga is a skill in action, and it says, “How do you express that in the most complex ways, in the most varied sorts of ways?” Because everybody has a different kind of genius, everybody has a different gift that they’re here to express and bring out from within themselves. Householder spirituality is also about a kind of radical stewardship and protection. In other words, that we’re here, we’re talking about saving us from nuclear annihilation. It’s our job in that sense, it’s not anybody else’s job to look to some salvific figure, to some guru, to some avatar. No, it’s our job as we awaken, as we grow, as we mature in spirituality, as in a householder path, to become responsible for the environment. It really shouldn’t be left in the hands of renunciates. If they were really renunciate, they wouldn’t care. A real renunciate would say, “They’re out! They’re just on the path out!” in a certain kind of way.

Rick: Oh, I was at the Science Nonduality Conference one time and a guy was up on stage who was a popular teacher, who actually is a householder, and a Buddhist teacher got up who was very concerned about the environment and social issues and so on. He said, “What about the environment? What about these social inequities?” and so on. And the guy on stage was like, “Eh, you know, the earth is like a little speck of dust, no matter what, it doesn’t matter what happens to it.” And that to me seemed inappropriate. And unnecessary and really not an attitude we want to promulgate. I mean you can’t evolve spiritually unless you actually have a body and can breathe and can eat and so on. And you know, this is a marvelous place in which to accomplish spiritual evolution. Let’s keep it going.

Paul: That’s right. And we’re in the … this is the sandhya time. The sandhya is the interval time or transition time between so-called Kali Yuga and so-called Satya Yuga. And we’re in this long period of transition, which is kind of betwixt and between, it’s not one, it’s not the other. It’s like the dawn. Is the dawn nighttime? Is the dawn daytime? Well, it’s a little of both. The remnants of the nighttime are still hanging around and then there is the anticipation of the rising sun and so on, and the coming new day and so on. And in that sandhya time, the betwixt and between time, which may last for a considerable period of time beyond our lifetimes, it’s the establishment or the setting up of those structures that are eventually going to result in a radically transformed culture, a radically transformed planet, a radically transformed way that human beings will interact with each other, will live, will take care of the environment, will manifest knowledge or creativity, the arts, whatever it might be. And that all of this is really in the arena of what the Shaiva tantric masters envisioned in terms of the refinement of life and the drawing forth of these potencies of consciousness in manifold ways that they’re expressed. One of the interesting, it’s a detail, but one of the interesting things is, I mentioned Abhinavagupta as a teacher, was kind of forgotten. The one place where he was remembered is in a kind of secondary agenda of his work, where he wrote about Indian aesthetics, the philosophy of art and artistic beauty, and his theory of art, the Rasa-Dwani theory, actually is well known and survived to this day. It was a kind of question about, “What is it that makes something beautiful in terms of an artistic creation?” And it’s really an application of the whole spirituality of the Shaiva tradition, but that was kind of lost, and yet his aesthetic theory, which … so he was open to the arts, he was open to creativity in that way, he was open to all the ways that human beings seek to express themselves in life, and not just this notion of giving it all up or declaring it all to be an illusion. He doesn’t say it’s an illusion, he says it’s only relatively real. But it’s not an illusion, it’s real, it’s just relatively real, it’s not absolutely real. And so there’s a difference between those perspectives that sweep everything away and say, “None of this matters, it doesn’t matter, you were never born, you never died.” These are non-dualistic teachings that are appropriate for renunciates, but you can’t live that way as a householder, it’s very difficult to tolerate.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that famous saying by Shankara which Ramana often quoted of, “The world is illusory, Brahman alone is real, Brahman is the world.” And then there’s that notion of mithya, you know, dependent reality where sure, a pot is nothing but clay but it’s still a pot and it can be used as a pot and so on.

Paul: That’s right.

Rick: You know, with regard to your mention of Kali Yuga and Satya Yuga and so on, I mean Kali Yuga is said to be 432,000 years long and we’re only 5,000 years into it supposedly, but I don’t know if that chronology is actually correct. But I have heard it said that when dharma reaches its nadir then it may take a long time and slow gradual decline to do that, but then it sort of hits rock bottom and rises up to 100% of restoration in a very short amount of time, like maybe a generation. And perhaps we’re beginning to see the signs of that and I don’t know, do you have any thoughts on that?

Paul: We’ll see. I mean, you know …

Rick: What can you say?

Paul: I think these are powerful, suggestive notions that don’t necessarily translate mathematically or in terms of astronomy or in terms of the history of the universe, etc. and so on, but are rather ways to understand the manifestations of time. I mean, one of the meanings of Shiva, he’s often called Mahakala, the great time, and this notion of time manifests in different flavors. In modern times we just have, “Well, time is the same all the time, it’s just time, it’s not different,” but there’s this notion that different kinds of things occur in different eons of time and that’s this teaching of the Kali Yuga, the Sat Yuga, Dvapara and Treta are ways of expressing this notion of a pulsating, transforming, evolving, and devolving structure of what’s interesting about this theory of time is that things get worse over time. It’s like the Sat Yuga is there and then it gets worse and worse and worse and worse, it’s really quite depressing in a certain way. But then there is the restoration or revival or rising up, and how long that’s going to take to happen, it’s also how long according to whom. In other words, are we talking human years, are we talking Divine years? So for me, sometimes people have said, “Well, the quoting is 432,000 years,” and all this stuff, and it’s like, “Well, I don’t necessarily need to take it literally.” It’s a very interesting notion that says we’re on the threshold of something really astonishing. We cannot actually, from our current perspective, project and predict what is going to evolve because it’s outside of the range of the ordinary predictability of our mind, but we’re on the verge of something astonishing and that there are waves of spiritually awakening human beings awakening, being born and so on, and that this is part of what we’re in the midst of. And that it’s kind of almost like a planetary emergency where it’s not as if we have all these perfect schools and these perfect teachings and these perfectly orderly things. It’s just that every single tradition is doing the best they can to manifest and express what they possibly can and add to the collective discourse in that way, and I think that’s the way I see it in terms of this Kashmir Shaiva tradition. It is very, very beautiful and it’s extraordinarily inspiring and necessary for us to understand.

Rick: Yeah, it just reminded me of something that Maharishi said when he was training us to be teachers on my course. He said, “If a war is on, there’s no time to train sharpshooters. You just give people a rifle and send them out.” So, we were a bunch of bozos, you know, 21 years old. Let me just throw in a question here. It’s a little bit of an abrupt segue from a fellow in California who submitted. David Darby in Grass Valley asked, “The broad description that you gave of Kashmir Shaivism Tantra sounds very similar to what a broad description of the fourth way as presented by Gurdjieff is, particularly as a non-renunciate householder path that involves a gradual refinement of consciousness and removal of illusions. Have you come across this tradition? Do you feel there are any links between the two traditions or a similar source?”

Paul: Well, I mean, I’ve read some of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s works and all that kind of stuff, but I can’t really say that I’m in a scholarly sort of way able to present a point-by-point comparison. I mean, it’s always fascinating when you get these parallel sorts of appearances of teachings where it seems like something echoes with something else. And of course, from a scholarly perspective, it’s like, “Is there an influence there or is this a parallel development? Is there a little of both?” It’s hard to say what that might be. And I think that, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, good. Another thing I’d like to bring in is the whole gross and subtle thing, both in terms of the emergence of creation from subtle to gross and the kind of like the reverse march of one’s experience from gross to subtle. And so, the whole implications of the power of the subtle as compared to the gross and many other things that I’m sure you could say about it. So, let’s talk about that stuff for a minute.

Paul: Well, I mean, what you’re mentioning is one of the fundamental teachings that is used everywhere in the text of the Shaiva Tantric tradition. You have this notion of bands of reality or vibratory bands of reality. The sthula is not just one level, it’s a band of reality that could be considered to be gross or crude, objective, superficial, fully manifested in a certain kind of way. Bands of the subtle, sukshma, bands of the extremely subtle, atisukshma, and then beyond all of that, something that transcends all of that structure, could be called atitha which just means utterly beyond, or para, the supreme, or whatever. And it’s a fundamental, extraordinarily useful map of both a kind of cosmic reality as well as of our own individual life. If we think of ourselves only in terms of our physical body, we’re clearly doing a disservice to ourselves. Even just our minds are excluded. It’s like, “Well, what about our minds?” And again, we’re talking about science and saying, “Well, science wants to say what’s happening in our mind is just an epiphenomenon or a secondary byproduct of our gross physical brain, etc.” And so on. It’s like, “No, the tradition says it’s the other way around. There is a physical body but there is also a subtle band of reality that is no longer physical or it borders on the physical and then gets more and more subtle,” and so on. And then there’s something extraordinarily subtle, and that we as individuals, we’re multidimensional beings. We exist on all those levels, except that most of the time we’ve forgotten or neglect or really ignore or do not have systematic access to those more interior or more subtle or higher vibratory levels. And the notion that says, “Well, the Spanda teaching,” this is where it comes from, the Kashaiva tradition, this notion of the vibration of consciousness. It’s the vibration of consciousness, it begins to thicken or coalesce. Abhinavagupta uses the term “shyānatā” or “ashyānatā.” It’s like something that is melted begins to thicken or coalesce, lava cools and it becomes rock or stone in that way. Consciousness in the same way, as it emerges, and it’s one of the fascinations of the Tantric masters is, “How does it emerge? Why does it emerge from the absoluteness? What is the process that governs that whole process of the spontaneous emergence of everything from some extraordinary transcendental source-place which can be called both full, purna, and also empty or completely devoid of anything, shunya? It’s both at the same time. And so why does that all happen? As it emerges, it emerges first at this level of the, I usually talk about it as “ati-ati sūtra,” extraordinarily, extraordinarily subtle. And what Abhinavagupta talks about there, he says, “In that first spontaneous, instantaneous emergence beyond the level of absoluteness, what manifests is called the Shakti Chakra, the extraordinary vortex wheel of the potencies of consciousness, an instantaneous manifestation of the total mandala of reality that contains all of the operating energies that will then go on to specialize and begin to modulate and express themselves in a great variety of ways.” This extraordinary mandala, he calls it the Anakya Shakti Chakra, the indescribable vortex wheel of power that simply emerges in this extraordinary expression. It’s the emission, in a certain sense. You have the Absolute, what breaches or breaks the transcendence of the Absolute? He says it’s a particular kind of Shakti called Visarga or Emissional Shakti that is fundamentally operative to finally force what is contained in the Absolute itself to express itself suddenly, instantaneously, into this extraordinarily subtle mandala of operating power. And the teachings of Kali in the Shaiva tradition are totally related to the understanding of this Anakya Shakti Chakra. We talk about the 12 different forms of the Kali, etc. etc. I usually speak about it and teach about it in terms of what I call the “cosmic operative force.” What is that cosmic operative force that is operating everything spontaneously and automatically and sequentially? Because this is one of the other great teachings of the Shaiva tradition, is the teaching of Krama or of sequentiality, from the non-sequential, absolute, formless, timeless space of the Absolute, there emerges sequentiality. And that sequentiality has, as its first instance, the expression of this extraordinary vortex wheel of power at the extraordinarily subtle level. At the level of our individual consciousness it’s there that the word, because you have the emergence of the objective universe on one track and the emergence of knowledge, language, and speech on a parallel track, and these are two parallel tracks of emergence that are happening. So you have the emergence of these cosmic operative forces on the level of the objective track of reality that will eventually oversee the manifestation and expression of all of samsara, we’re not just talking about the physical universe, we’re talking about all of possible samsara. On the other hand, you have the expression and manifestation of the levels of knowledge and of the expressions of knowledge in language. And so, the expression of the paschanti vats, the visioning word that is part and parcel of this indescribable vortex wheel of power. So on the emergence side, all of that then proceeds through the ati-sukshma, the very subtle, the sukshma, the subtle, and then eventually the freezing or coagulation or condensation or petrification of consciousness into the forms of the world. Everything is made of consciousness. The tradition says, “Na shivam vidyate kvacit,” there is absolutely nothing that is not consciousness. However, as it has expressed itself in this frozen sort of way, we cannot see or perceive or even understand the fact that it is made of consciousness until somehow that frozenness or petrification melts once again. That’s a whole separate part of the whole process. On the return journey then, at the individual level, we have the cosmic process of manifestation, the manifestation of individual life waves, or they’re called anoos, individual transmigrating individual selves, the anoos. And the anus are marked by the fact that they’re held in place in their individuality by what are called the malas, these sheaths of limitation. The fundamental one is called the anava mala, which brings about the absence of fullness. So, the feeling of the absence of fullness is there in the anava mala. Then you have what’s called the maya mala, which brings about the operation of differentiation and difference. And then the karma mala, which creates, it’s not karma, it’s karma with a long a, which means the agency, the sense of agency. So, within ourselves we have a place inside ourselves where we feel incomplete, inadequate, we’re not whole. It creates a problem, it creates a difficulty, it creates stress, it creates fear or anxiety, it creates also the absence of full knowledge, it also creates desire. Desire arises out of the apurnatva, or the absence of fullness, in order to try to fill what is not full, there is the expression of the movement of desire. It’s a question of does it actually fill it or not is a separate question. So, you have the anava mala, then you have the maiya mala, which creates difference. And the focus or the emphasis of the anoo is on difference. Consciousness is predominantly focused on difference in a certain kind of way, loses track or sight of the underlying or subjacent unity and the thread of non-duality is lost. And then it creates also the sensation of arrogating to ourselves our sense of agency. I’m doing this, the karma mala, it says inside ourselves, “I’m doing this,” whereas really what’s doing it is this free-standing, freely operating, totally free energy of the shakti, but we superimpose on the movements of the shakti that sensation, “I’m the one who’s performing these actions,” and that creates then the anu, the transmigrating self in that way. Then the entire journey, and Abhinavagupta, as a great Shaiva theologian and master, he gets asked basically, he asks the questions himself and then he answers his own questions, basically, “Why does this all happen?” You see? People say, “Well, wasn’t everything perfect the way it was? Why do we have to go into this big mess of all of this that arises?” He says, “It is out of the freedom, the swatantriya of that. If reality were only constrained to be absolute, there is a subtle bond of limitation imposed on that absolute reality. Therefore, if that reality is ultimate freedom, it must have as its intrinsic nature the capacity to express itself also in the rising up of separateness, of difference, of change, of transformation, of specificity, and the structures of individuality that arise there. Otherwise, we could indict freedom and say, “Look, freedom has been limited, therefore it cannot be said to be totally free.” So it is out of the freedom of the absolute, that bondage and limitation arise. It’s an incredibly beautiful teaching. It’s not out of some mistake, it’s not some error, it’s not some fundamental sort of problematic or curse or anything like that. It is simply the expression of the freedom that it wants to express itself and indeed encapsulates, Shiva Shakti would say, encapsulates himself/herself within all of these transmigrating beings in that way. However, once that’s happened then those beings in the forgetfulness, in the Nataraja murtis you have, he dances on this little figure of the Apasmara, the dwarf of forgetfulness is called the Apasmara, and so in that forgetfulness we’ve forgotten all of this. The question then is, how does all of this arise? Once again, that’s the whole teaching of upaya, of different levels of initiation, etc. and so on. And I think that there’s a tremendous amount … I’m trying to talk about a lot of different things at once here.

Rick: Let me just throw in a couple of things here. I’m just reminded of that thing in the Gita where Krishna says, “Prakrti-mri-svam avashtavya vishwajami punah punah,” taking recourse to myself or curving back on myself I create again and again, and it’s this thing about kind of the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness that creates this sort of threefold structure within the oneness and … what are you doing there? Harry is making gestures at me … and you know, results in the whole diversification and emergence of creation. And it’s funny, it’s interesting also to note in physics they have this thing called, what is it called, spontaneous sequential symmetry breaking or something like that, where the sort of unified levels of creation become more and more diversified through a breaking of symmetries and eventually it becomes material creation. You may want to comment on all that, but do you or shall I ask the next question?

Paul: Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Rick: Okay, so what I just want to say was, so based upon everything you just described in terms of the whole range of creation from gross to subtle and transcendent, and you referred to us as multi-dimensional beings, would you say that a good definition of an enlightened person might be someone who has fully realized their multi-dimensionality in the sense that their awareness is not restricted to some limited range but is open to the full range of reality from gross to subtle to transcendent and is fully capable of functioning on any or all of those levels, either simultaneously or selectively according to the need of the circumstance?

Paul: Yeah, that’s beautiful, I like that very much. I mean I think that, as you know, there are stages to all of this also. So in terms of saying, “Well, how do we attain? How do we master? How do we establish more fully evolved states of consciousness?” In the Shaiva texts then they talk about the turiya state, a fourth state of consciousness, which is also talked about in the Vedantic texts, etc. and so on, turiyatita, beyond the fourth state of consciousness. Then they want to talk about what’s called the atma-vyapti, and the atma-vyapti really corresponds to one interpretation possibly of what Kaivalya is taught in the dualistic texts of classical yoga and classical Sankhya, which is a state in which in the classical yoga vocabulary the purusha has risen from being experienced as somehow lost in the prakritic body-mind structure to its own separateness. And there is this, it is still a dualistic state but it is the rising of the atman or the self or the purusha value so that it has fully risen. As you know, however, that doesn’t end the process, that’s really kind of a halfway stage. And the Shaiva tradition then speaks about what’s called the divya-chakshus, the evolution of the perception of the celestial or the divine within external perception, and then finally what’s called the Shiva-vyapti, the perception of everything in terms of the absolute consciousness itself, in which the perception of an object is not lost but yet there is the perception of it in terms of these. So it’s a very, very beautiful model that is found in a number of these texts of these stages in the growth of consciousness. And for the Shaiva tradition, really, it is only when the Shiva-vyapti state is reached that one can say the full unfolding of all of that. Now it’s, you know, referring back to what you said before, none of these are closed-ended. In other words, Abhinavagupta himself in one of his other texts, a very beautiful text called the Paratrinshika-vivarana, which is an exquisite commentary on matrika-shakti, on this whole notion of mantra and so on, and he says, “Thus far and so much have I seen. Greater beings who will come after will see more and further than I have. However, on the basis of my own awakening,” and he uses the term shaktipata, the initiatory descent of the great potency of consciousness, “I have seen this much and I have taught this much,” etc., and it’s an extraordinarily humble statement and also a statement that is reverential in awe in the face of that ultimacy of reality. It’s not a closed-ended sort of thing. Sometimes when you have these staged models and people say, “Well, that’s a closed-ended thing,” it’s not closed-ended. It’s just that at a certain moment then it’s so far beyond the capacity of an ordinary mind to understand that it really becomes almost pointless to even try to narrate more fine-tuned stages within that. And I think that the study of great beings and masters and so on, it’s often, you mentioned it before and I agree, that it’s often the case that a master will say, “Well, this was when I achieved full enlightenment,” and then if one studies the life of that individual one sees that they kept on growing, they kept on modifying their teachings, they kept on evolving further and more expansive and also more subtle expressions and articulations of the whole matter, and then also reported other things transpiring within the field of their awareness that do not correspond to a notion of a static end-station in which then everything comes to an end in that way.

Rick: Yeah, and you just actually mentioned an important example of that, I want to make sure people caught that, and you referred to self-realization, but that doesn’t necessarily imply appreciating the full value of the object of experience. And there’s a sort of a unified quality to that self-realization that one might think, “This is it, this is non-duality,” and yet the whole relative creation is seen as separate from that.

Paul: Still stulla.

Rick: Yeah, it’s not seen in its ultimate value as being the very same stuff essentially as the self which has been realized. And so it’s more of a duality than we had to begin with, in a sense.

Paul: Yes, it is. It is a full, real duality and that’s exactly right. And the thing is, you see, now coming back to tantra and people saying, “Well, what’s the definition of tantra?” One of the ways to understand the evolution in the historical sense of you have the classical yoga as one of the six darshana, shuddh darshana systems, and then you have almost parallel but moving on centuries afterwards, the evolution of the Shaiva tantra is the difference between forms of practice that are primarily introversive and going inside, versus forms of practice that were primarily extroversive. The whole basis of the tantric curriculum of initiatory and esoteric practice was based on the notion that all of the prior stuff, it’s kind of like a person, in order to learn calculus they need to know some basic mathematics, they need to know some algebra, they need to know some trigonometry and so on, and only then can you begin to understand calculus, the higher calculus, or whatever higher forms of mathematics even exist and all of that. You have to have that foundation so that the dualistic rising to the Atma Vyapti, which could be, I know there are people who want to depict Kaivali in different ways, I bow to them, but I’m just saying it seems like a prima facie reading of Kaivali is this state of the separateness of the purusha from all the prakritic structures of the individual body-mind, that then that forms a platform and foundation in which now practice that’s going to happen is going to be extroversive. In other words, that there’s going to be a movement from the purusha into the prakritic, which is not really kosher, it’s not really permitted within the classical yoga system. The movement of consciousness that begins to breach the separation of those two, and that that extroversive movement is really the heart of the higher forms of practice in the tantric tradition. I’m sorry, you have a question?

Rick: Yeah, I want to make sure people understand what you mean by “extroversive movement.” And Kaivali means “alone,” right? Yeah, okay, so if you’re kind of alone in the self and yet there’s this whole relative creation that you haven’t engulfed within that wholeness of the self, then you’re not alone. There’s somebody else breathing down your neck, the whole universe. And so this extroversive, if that’s the word you used, “immersion,” is that the way you said it? It would seem to me to be a bleeding of the oneness of the self into the diversity of creation. And it’s not like it’s emanating out from us into it, it’s that we’re kind of realizing more and more and more subtly and deeply that the creation in its essence is the very same thing that we are in our essence. And so when that’s fully realized then there’s only one totality and all diversity is subsumed within that.

Paul: Right, beautiful, exactly. And that’s what … you see, in terms of … I mean, there are beautiful ways that this gets taught and expressed in the Shaiva tradition. One is in terms of these different terms for the Goddess force of consciousness. And so they say, “Look, the operation of the Goddess force of consciousness can be narrated in terms of four forms of the Goddess. The first of these is called Vama. Vama means that from the depths of the transcendent there is this outward explosion of relative reality of individuals, of difference, of change, etc., and so on, and that it’s a current that is continuously emanating from the heart of ultimacy, that is emanating out and asserting very powerfully the facing of consciousness or individual awareness out toward the objective universe.” And that therefore … I mean, this is one of the problems in practice, because if your awareness is being swept in this tidal wave of the Vama, extroversive, outwardly looking movement of awareness, how do you move against that Vama current in order to go inside? This is one of the problems of meditative practice. Now the Tantric tradition says, “Look, just as reality outwardly expands, so too does it flow back toward the center.” We have this Sankocha-Vikasa, the expansion and contraction of the heart of reality. So they say there is a parallel current, and she is called Jyeshta. Jyeshta means “senior” or “prior.” The movement of the Jyeshta current moves from the sthula, or surface level of reality, back toward the heart of consciousness and into the transcendent. And the idea is that if you can locate that current, it’s like placing a little canoe in a river, it will flow effortlessly on that current back into the Absolute. So it’s not a question of fighting, you know, sometimes I use these silly analogies in talking about this, the Vama current is kind of like trying to go up the down escalator. You have a down escalator that’s moving everything out, and you’re trying to go against the flow of that, and it becomes a notion of a battle, a war, it becomes effortful, it becomes difficult. Actually it becomes impossible. It’s not possible to counteract the impulse of the Vama current. She is so strong that in that field of reality she will always flow everything out from the Absolute down into the specificities of the relative. So the question in practice then is, how do you locate the inception point of the Jyeshta current that will move from sthula, the surface, into the subtle, into the subtlest, and into the transcendent, and how do you find that current? It’s the secret esoteric current, and so on, and that’s at the very center of initiatory practice in a certain sense, the Jyeshta current. Now that doesn’t end there, however, because the tradition says, “Then, as you cultivate the movement of awareness on this extroversive Vama current and this introversive Jyeshta current that rises in and more and more subtle and takes us eventually, takes our attention to merge into its source in the Absoluteness, there is a third current called the Raudri current. The Raudri current is a higher level extroversive current that flows down from the Absolute, transforming and transmuting all of the tattva structures that it encounters in this way. And the Raudri current is really, in a certain sense, the heart of the whole tantric enterprise of transmutation and divinization. As practice begins to activate this higher flow of the Raudri current, a flow of non-dual embracing Absoluteness is somehow paradoxically flowing into you to encounter your Buddhi, your pre-egoic awareness, your Ahamkara, your individual identity assemblage point, your Manas, your operating mind, your Buddhindriyas, your sense capacities, your Karmindriyas, and then eventually the Tanmatras and Mahabhutas are all being bathed in the extroversive flow of transformational consciousness. And this is one of the meanings of the Kundalini Shakti. In other words, the Kundalini Shakti is understood here as this transmutational spontaneous force that is flowing out and down. It’s one of the reasons also people say this term “Shaktipata,” why is it descending? Because it is descending from the Absolute to embrace and enclose and hold our individuality, but in that sense transmuting its functionality, radically transmuting its functionality. Before we were talking about householder practice we were saying this is the essence of the third form. We have the Srishti form of householder practice which is radical creativity, the Stiti form of householder practice which is radical stewardship and protection, as it were, the protection of everything in life. We have to protect things and maintain them in a certain way, and then radical transformation. And this Raudry current then is what is at play, particularly starting at the level of this attainment of the Apti, and it begins to bathe the individual structure in such a force of transformative potency of consciousness that it is radically transmuting the functionality of the mind, of the ego, and of the senses from contraction, limitation, narrowness, and overshadowing of ignorance and so on, to being vessels for luminosity, vessels for extraordinary capacity, vessels for highest possibilities, vessels for extraordinary natural virtues, vessels for inspiration and insight and wisdom, vessels for every possible form of outward expression. And that this Raudry current then, in a certain sense, is at the very core of the higher stages of what the Shaiva tantra path envisions with regard to this whole process. Within that then, we begin to see the objects in a higher meaningful glow and a higher level of their profundity, of their sacredness. Life begins to reveal to us that what appear to be ordinary objects of a crude sort are not that at all, that they are stripping away the superficiality of things, beginning to see the value, the deeper value, the deepest values. And within that we begin to catch glimpses of what could be called, the tradition says, the Divya Chakras or the Divine Eye, or using this word, Maharshi used it, the Celestial, the Celestial value or the highest value within the relative structure of reality of everything. We begin to see everything in the glow of this exquisiteness of such an extraordinary sort. And this is part and parcel of the tantric teachings when they talk about the Rasa, the Rasa or the flavor, the nectar of everything, and tantricas as Rasikas, people who taste both the Celestial and also eventually the non-dual within every experience of life altogether. And so, I mean, it’s just, there are exquisite teachings within that.

Rick: Yeah.

Paul: It is, yeah.

Rick: Beautiful.

Paul: There’s much more, yeah.

Rick: I got goosebumps a couple times while you were saying all that. I hope people really tuned into what you’re saying because it’s extremely important and amazing. And here’s a little sentence from one of your books which kind of recapitulates and encapsulates what you just said, or part of what you just said. Through the systematic practice of meditation, the mind gains the spontaneous ability of great habitual easefulness in the movement from the gross to the subtle to the extremely subtle. And I know you’re familiar with the notion of natural tendency of the mind to seek a field of greater happiness and these subtler realms being intrinsically more gratifying or charming or fulfilling. So the type of meditation you teach, does it take advantage of that tendency and that’s why it’s effortless?

Paul: Yes. So I talk about it in terms of three different values. I talk about the sphutta value which is the luminous, the pulsating incandescence of the light of consciousness. The light always expands, it always moves toward more and more. Light is not static, it’s not something that doesn’t … so consciousness as the maha-prakasha, as the great light, then is shaping itself as our individual awareness but the inherent … in Sanskrit it’s called the swabhavata, what is the inherent nature of the mind? This is the question that the Shaiva Tantric tradition asks, it says, “Just like the swabhava of fire is heat, just like the swabhava of the flower is its perfume, so too the swabhava of the mind is that it is expansive in its character, vikasa, it is always moving toward something more or it wants to move toward something more.” And the question then is, what is the directionality for that movement toward expansion going to take and is it going to move on the vama current out toward more and more acquisition, more and more possessions, more and more external experiences of a sensory sort at the surface of life and/or is it also going to move in terms of this expansiveness of the interior states where we begin to understand? Use the word “charm,” it’s a very beautiful word. The Tantric tradition says, “Just the intensity or pulsation of the shakti increases as you approach that absoluteness.” Just like the sun in the sky emanates heat, as you get closer to the sun it gets hotter. So as you get closer to the self, the intensity of the ananda or bliss value of the absolute increases and as our mind registers that, the mind spontaneously wants to get absorbed within that. So the swabhava of the mind in this tradition is this sphurata value that says it’s expansive in its character, we can say it goes toward more and more because of these explanations the tradition says, and as a result of that eventually we experience, I mentioned before, hridaya vishanti, we learn how to repose or rest in the heart, here heart not meaning the physical heart chakra but really in the absoluteness itself. Now within that also then, I mean there’s a lot to talk about here, but there’s two other values, the soma and the spandana value. The soma value is really the inherent nature of the body. What is the nature of the body? It is the livingness, the vibrancy or throb, what’s called in the tantric texts the “kshobha.” The throb of life within the body is such that it is always moving to try to replicate and maintain the highest degree of wholeness that is possible to be maintained within a living structure. It may not be absolute wholeness but it’s what is the highest degree of relative wholeness that is possible to be maintained within the physical body and that’s the swabhava of the living body. It has that swabhava because of the presence of consciousness. Once consciousness departs we know that wholeness is not maintained and the body will then go back to its constituent five elements, etc., and so on, at the time of death and the decomposition of the body. So, it is the presence of consciousness and of what we could call the soma value of wholeness that is constantly operating. How do we increase the field of functionality of that soma value within the physical body? See that’s part of the question of practice because as that value increases it goes to work doing all of those things automatically and spontaneously that it needs to do within the body. Therefore, one of the really beautiful insights of the Tantric Shaivite tradition is they distinguish between what they call natural and spontaneous practice versus artificial and synthetic practices. They’re both categories of practice but they’re saying that the higher in Sanskrit is called akritrima. What are those practices that harness the natural inherent nature of the body and the mind such that then they function not on the basis of individual genius or skill or predilection or taste or whatever, but they function by harnessing that natural, the inherent nature of what is there, the svabhavata of the mind, which is its sphurata value, this incandescent pulsation, the svabhavata of the body, which is the soma value. And it is that increased range of operation of the soma value which then goes to work basically doing, you were talking before about the releasing of everything that’s been accumulated inside, etc. So it’s an extraordinary understanding of the autonomous, spontaneous nature of this natural intelligence of the body, given a wider range of operation, doing automatically what is necessary to transform and transmute, rather than having us have to, you know, people sometimes talk about, “I need to clear my chakras,” and this and the other, and all this. No, that should happen automatically. It should happen as part of the natural housekeeping.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like saying, “I need to digest my sandwich.”

Paul: Exactly.

Rick: Try doing that intentionally, you know, “I need to get some blood down to my toe.”

Paul: Exactly, that’s exactly it. Or you have a scar, you have a cut, what is it that heals it? You see, there’s a natural intelligence that’s operative within there, just give it a wider range of what’s called the soma value. So anyway, there’s lots more to talk about that.

Rick: It’s great stuff. I want to accomplish a couple of things in the remainder of our time together. One is a more thorough discussion of what you’re actually … well, you’ve given us a good explanation just now, I think, of the mechanics of the meditation you teach, in terms of its basic principles. Maybe people would like to hear something even more specific. I mean, do you teach mantras or what do you do? If you would like to say a bit more. And since I’ve just asked this question, now let me go ahead on that, if you’d like, and what more can you tell people about the nature of the practice, the routine of it, how much do you do it, how often, how long, and even if you’d like to say what’s involved in learning, what does it cost, how long does it take to learn?

Paul: Yeah, sure, of course. I started teaching this practice 10 years ago and basically now I’ve grown to have trained people who are teachers of this practice, so they’re now teachers in a lot of different locations. We have 33 teachers now and we’re hoping to have more teachers. So my focus has moved somewhat from teaching the practice itself to teaching teachers of the practice over the last five years. It’s been a very, very beautiful investment in very wonderful individuals who’ve come forward to teach it. Yes, mantra is at the very center of it, but it is an understanding of mantra that’s quite nourished and sophisticated in terms of what the Tantric tradition wants to say. A mantra is not fully contained in its constituent phonemes, or what are called “varnas” in Sanskrit. The phonemes are like the outer covering of the mantra. The Tantric tradition speaks about what’s called the mantra vidya, the potency of the mantra. The potency of the mantra is fundamentally awakened consciousness. The issue then has to do with how does a mantra contain this awakened consciousness such that the mantra is alive in a certain way and that the mantra is that mechanism or tool, the vibratory key that meshes with the overarching, I call it the baseline vibration of the body-mind. It’s like we’re all vibrating beings, we have multiple interacting and intersecting levels of vibration, but there’s a baseline vibration of our whole individuality, and then there’s a single vibratory key that unlocks access to the jesta current, fundamentally. So it’s what is that vibration which, when it is simply pulsated in the awareness very easily without effort, begins to open our individual attention to this current that will move in the interiorizing direction and take us inside automatically in that way. That’s the fundamental structure. It’s learned in a two-day process, basically, over the course of two days, somewhere in the range from $400 to about $600 to take that course. There’s an 18-month process of support and study, so it’s not just the weekend or the two days of study. We have a whole system set up for supporting people in their first stages, and for me it’s just very crucial to offer people support in the daily practice of meditation. It starts with about 15 or 20 minutes, can move up to 45 minutes as people advance more and more, but supporting people to the point where they become autonomous or self-sufficient in their practice. And that involves both a deepening of the practice but it also involves a refining of understanding as we were speaking before. What is it that’s actually happening? How do I understand what’s taking place within me as a result of my meditation? How do I value what’s important and not value what’s not important in what’s transpiring within my awareness in that way? And so, I was a full professor at the University of Rochester and basically starting in around Wonderful colleagues, wonderful university. I had thousands of wonderful students there and yet there was something that was really, really calling me to come back to meditation and to really begin to offer a practice of meditation from the context of the Shaiva householder tradition in this way, using this vocabulary of the tradition. So obviously there’s much more to say about that.

Rick: Oh yeah, I was just thinking that, I was thinking, “Well we could go on this topic for an hour,” but I just want to say I’ve been meditating in probably a similar way for almost 50 years myself and I’ve never missed one actually in 50 years, at least twice a day for at least an hour basically. And that’s not because I have some kind of superhuman self-discipline or … in fact when I first started a lot of my friends just said, “Oh yeah, right now he’s on his latest kick and we’ll see what he’s doing in a week.” But it was so profound and so effective and just so transformational from day one and continue to be year after year, that it’s never been a matter of discipline or struggle or effort or anything to stick with it.

Paul: That’s right, it’s beautiful, it’s absolutely beautiful, exactly. That’s exactly it and that’s what wanting to offer people in different modalities. There’s different branches, there’s different schools, etc. and so on, but that understanding of the akritrima, of the natural spontaneous practice that functions not on the basis of our skill or talent or belief or predisposition, but is really an opening to an existing current of consciousness that we can begin to travel in and that will embrace us and that takes us in and that is really delightful and sumptuous in its inner experience, extraordinarily fulfilling and nourishing, and also extraordinarily refining to everything that we experience after and during our daily life as a result of our practice, it’s really beautiful.

Rick: Exactly, I mean it’s such a sweet and fulfilling experience and like you said, that whole thing you said about the word started with an “R” …

Paul: Raudrate, the Raudrate.

Rick: Yeah, about that sort of infusing itself into all the … that was so beautiful and so true of my experience. It’s like, well I mean just a simple example is you take a bucket of water and then you throw it on the plants, the plants flourish or you take a cloth and dip it in the dye, comes out and it’s colored, whatever, but there’s like this soaking up of this inner beauty, and then it just … when you come out in activity and engage in activity for a number of hours, it just begins to permeate and transform every phase of your activity. It’s like fuel, you know, that kind of nourishes … or like sap in a tree that nourishes every aspect of the tree.

Paul: It’s beautiful, yes, that’s exactly right, beautiful, beautiful.

Rick: Another thing I want to get into with you, we’ll go a little long because this is so interesting, and this might seem a little academic but I think it will actually have practical implications for people in terms of the understanding of it. You say that Abhinavagupta, if I’m pronouncing his name right, sort of took issue with the Yoga Sutras and the way that was traditionally understood, and he rejected the sort of notion, as I understood what you were saying, that the limbs of yoga, as Patanjali outlined them, grow sequentially. And I got the sense that you were saying that he said that they actually grow simultaneously, as do the limbs in a body, as when an embryo turns into a fetus into a human being. And so that would imply that it’s not like you go through all these different steps and eventually get to Samadhi, but that you begin with Samadhi on day one to a certain degree of clarity.

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Rick: And that over time all the limbs of yoga, if we want to take that model, they all refine and grow simultaneously, right?

Paul: Yes, absolutely, and that’s well said. He has an agenda in mind with regard to wanting to present a non-dual tradition that is yet based on a prior dualistic tradition, which is classical yoga and classical Sankhya. And so what he’s really doing in a certain sense is remodeling and expanding a house. You have the house and then you want to build higher stories on the whole thing and add to it. So you have to have a certain amount of remodeling that’s going to happen. It’s kind of nuanced and complex, but he does that in his Tantraloka in great detail. And he takes the perspective also that what is central, and this is a whole huge chapter of his Tantraloka, this massive encyclopedia called The Light on the Tantras, the 13th daily lesson or anika is devoted to the concept of Shakti-pada, which is an extraordinarily mysterious concept, but it has to do with the movement of freedom within the structures of bondage. How is it that freedom moves within the structures of bondage and limitation? And that the nature of reality is such that no matter what structure of bondage or limitation, smallness, contraction, ignorance or loss is there, there’s going to be some movement of freedom that’s going to come and open that up, and that we experience that as human beings in the sense of a kind of trajectory of life that at a certain moment something begins to happen inside us that is radically impelling us from deepest levels inside us to a transformed outlook on life, to a transformed perspective on what we want to do with our life, and to open us and make us even interested in dimensions of life and dimensions of existence that pre-exist. And prior to that may have been absolutely disinteresting to us. And this he calls Shakti-pada, and there’s a whole investigation, what causes Shakti-pada? How does it move? What are the different stages of Shakti-pada? What are the different levels of intensity of Shakti-pada, etc., and so on? But the bottom line is, he says, that basically it is that, if we want to use the term “awakening,” but it’s this burgeoning and opening and blossoming from inside of this increased vibrancy, luminosity, and potency of consciousness that is going to begin to move the individual from deep inside into a trajectory of seeking out a path, a sequence of teachings, a sequence of teachers, etc., and so on, and will in fact be the basis and foundation for that individual then investing themselves in their life into practice. And Shakti-pada is sometimes understood as a kind of initiation that a teacher gives, etc. That’s also an understanding that a Bhagavad Gita gives. But he’s talking about the radical or root awakening that happens in the trajectory of sequences of life. The individual that has been encased and limited and even imprisoned within this anu, this limited transmigrating individual, manifesting ignorance, limitation, the absence of knowledge, etc., and so on, suddenly something from within the core of that individual begins to burgeon and begins to move and begins to transform and change. And I talk about it sometimes as when there’s a kind of an earthquake that happens at the bottom of the ocean, the tsunami wave that will happen at the surface takes some time to happen. The tsunami wave of transformation and force at the level of the surface of the ocean is an expression of an extraordinary hidden event that even possibly doesn’t even exist or take place within the level of the relative individuality. It’s on the borderline of the individuality and the absoluteness of the individual. Some fundamental radical transmutation of that relationship that begins to release the constricting power of the malas, of these constricting rings of limitation. And on that basis, and on that basis alone, he argues then, the individual will engage in transformative, radically transformative spiritual practice to one degree or another. So he wants to talk about mild, medium, and intense levels of Shaktipattha. It’s a very, very fascinating kind of discourse about that, but that’s the basis of it. It’s on that basis, he says, that an individual then seeks out a teacher, receives initiation, receives teaching, learns ritual practices, learns about different texts and traditions, etc. and so on. It’s all on the basis of this surging impulse of the movement of freedom from inside that has priorly taken place and is even beyond the capacity of the individual to inspect. In other words, it’s not a phenomenon that we can become aware of, it’s something that’s actually radically, it’s the beginnings of the movement of that Raudry Current that we talked about before. It’s down-streaming into the individual to impel that individual toward transformation. And then you have the destiny of that individual, the karma of that individual, the past connections of that individual that lead that individual out into relationships with teachers, with traditions, with different lineage streams, with different sorts of expressions that might be there. It’s the complex, indescribable play of karma that comes in at that point, of destiny of the individual led in a variety of different traditions. But it’s a very, very important concept of Shaktipata that is at the center of the whole thing. And there also, see, the Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras and also in the various commentaries of Vyasa Bhasha and so on, of the Yoga Sutra, there is no explicit concept of grace in this text. Later commentators have wanted to read it back in, mainly because then the evolution of the Shaiva tradition that popularizes this notion of grace. But there is no notion of grace, it’s basically the notion that says, “Well, the individual begins to practice through assiduous and prolonged effort,” as the Yoga Sutra says, “there is a speed of attainment,” etc., and so on and all of that. That’s also one of the radical remodelings, in a sense, he has to make a place for this concept of Shaktipata that is there.

Rick: Yeah, well, God helps those who help themselves, right?

Paul: He helps us to help ourselves, yes. She helps us.

Rick: One thing I was wondering about the whole Yoga thing though, the Patanjali, is that the whole idea of the correlation between all the different values of life, such as ethical behavior and the growth of Samadhi. And, you know, some teachers have said that, “Well, they’re all going to grow apace and not be out of sync with one another,” but then there are people like Ken Wilber that talk about lines of development and how one line can get really out of whack with other lines, and there seem to be many examples of this happening. So I find that interesting. I don’t know what Kashmir Shaivism has to say about it.

Paul: Well, I mean, that comes back to this whole notion of Vikalpa Samskara, where there’s a disjunction and an out-of-synch-ness with regard to some rising degree of interior experience, and yet it hasn’t fully established itself at the level of action, at the level of speech, at the level of discernment, and so on, of the individual, and also at the level of knowledge. And so that’s part of the catching up of these various dimensions.

Rick: Yeah, like is it a tight rope tying these things together or a big stretchy rubber band?

Paul: Well, it’s just different aspects that, you know, eventually, yes, you have when the movement of that potency of consciousness is sufficiently potent and powerful and surges through the individual, there will be radical rearrangements and surfacing of the different virtues, in a certain sense the saintly virtues, the capacity for love, the capacity for patience, for compassion, for forgiveness, for extraordinary selflessness, etc., and so on. These are also expressions of the higher manifestations of the expression of life at that level, but it may be some time before that happens. As you know, these are multi-lifetime sorts of perspectives, not just in a single lifetime.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that. Of course, some people don’t even believe in lifetimes because they say there is no self ultimately, so how could anybody reincarnate because there’s nobody to reincarnate, but I don’t even want to get into that whole argument.

Paul: That’s right. A great one, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I’d like to … I’ve locked horns with people on that one before, but two sutras from the Shiva Sutras I’d like to conclude with and have you just comment briefly on each one because I thought they were fascinating. One is that … maybe we’ll take the second one first, that the knowledge of the self constitutes a natural, spontaneous, non-conceptual, and immediate state of certainty. And the word “certainty” kind of jumps out at me because a lot of people talk about being so open-minded as to not be plagued by doubts, but not be trying to be … like Nisargadatta said something along the lines of that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity are signs of spiritual maturity. So that seems to contradict a little bit the word “certainty.”

Paul: Well, I think we have to interpret that on various levels. In other words, if we take the opposite, one of the synonyms for the mala in the Kashmir Shaiva teachings is “shanka,” and shanka is most commonly translated as doubt or hesitation, anxiety or fear or uncertainty. And so, it’s not just certainty of knowledge, it’s a state of doubting yourself fundamentally, of doubting everything about life, of doubting the universe, of doubting God, and so on. And the notion of certainty in that beautiful sutra that you just quoted from the Shiva Sutra is not necessarily just about an intellectual certainty that chooses one thing over another. It’s about a certain kind of knowledge that is so immovable and steady that yes, it can encompass within its breadth and steadiness the apparent paradoxes. When you’re dealing with ultimacy you’re dealing with inherent contradictions. The absolute is that about which contradictory things can be correctly asserted. You can say it’s empty and you can say it’s full and they’re both true, you see. And so, the question is, it’s not about saying, “Well, you have to choose one of those alternatives,” it’s about saying, “What is that state or level of consciousness that is so steady?” The Sanskrit word is “dharadhya,” it’s immovable, it’s absolutely rock steady. And within that then, different kinds of thought streams will be shaped in the awareness of such an individual that are applicable or appropriate for different circumstances of life. It isn’t about a doctrinal certainty that says, “This is what’s right and this is what’s wrong,” it’s more about saying, “This is reality and this is how reality appears and shows itself up and in my life there is the capacity to encompass that huge diversity because we know that that diversity is also taking place on the underlying invisible fabric or thread of the non-difference, of the non-duality that is where consciousness is stabilized.”

Rick: Good.

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. You could almost perhaps substitute the word “confidence” for “certainty.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so the final one, this would be a nice one to end on, it’s really sweet. The stations and stages of yoga are marked by the experience of surprise, wonder, and blissful astonishment.

Paul: I love it, I know.

Rick: Isn’t that awesome?

Paul: Vismayo, it’s beautiful. Vismayo, yoga, bhumika, it’s one of my absolute favorites, top favorites you picked, so thank you for that. Yes, it’s this clearly … first of all, “yoga” here doesn’t mean asana practice or just the practice of the ashtanga or whatever.

Rick: Right, it means mystical union or whatever.

Paul: Exactly, the whole path, the whole path. And the notion of bhumis or stages here is what we’ve been talking about with regard to these stages in the evolutionary growth of consciousness and the solidification of higher and higher, more evolved and more refined states of the whole thing. And that within that then, it’s also, we were alluding to this, from a lower level it is impossible for us to fully comprehend, envision, understand, or imagine what is going to transpire and reveal itself as consciousness grows from that lower level to a higher level of consciousness. Therefore what happens is that in the encounter with that transformational process, as higher states of consciousness are revealing themselves, there will be this delightful experience of surprise, of wonder, of astonishment, of exclamation, of joy, of a certain kind of blissfulness, and also just a revelatory quality of seeing something that you’ve never seen before, understanding something that you’ve never understood before, and experiencing something that is beyond the range of ordinary experience up until then. So vismayo, it’s a beautiful word, and smaya in Sanskrit also means smile, it brings a smile to the face, it’s a smile of delight, of joy, of ananda, of happiness.

Rick: Yeah, one of the reasons I like that verse and one of the reasons I like this whole conversation we’ve been having and everything that you work on is that I feel that a lot of times enlightenment is kind of dumbed down. I mean you hear people saying things like, “Oh yeah, enlightened people can be depressed, they can be prone to anger, they can be into drinking,” or whatever. And somebody I interviewed a couple of years ago recently committed suicide, and he had a … because he was suffering some rather severe pain, but something that perhaps could have been solved, but his feeling was, “Eh, I’m going to get a new body, this one’s not working out so well,” and it really confused a lot of people. They think, “How could he do this? How could a person who’s supposedly awake do this?” So I really like that … you were talking earlier about maps, I really like things which help to give people a clear conception of what the possibilities are, of what enlightenment might actually be, so it doesn’t get shortchanged, you know, and so we don’t think of it as something that’s hardly an improvement on what many of us are already experiencing, you know, but something that really would perhaps make life infinitely more fulfilling than it ordinarily is, and full of surprise, wonder, and blissful astonishment.

Paul: Yeah, well said, beautiful, I love it. Exactly, I couldn’t agree more, exactly right.

Rick: Great. Well, I better wrap it up because you and I could go on all day. So thank you so much, Paul, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Paul: Oh, thank you, I’m so glad.

Rick: Yeah, it was great, and I think a lot of people will really enjoy it, and they can go to bluethroatyoga.com and find out more about you, get in touch, figure out how to learn your meditation. I’ll be linking to that of course from your page on BatGap, and you have quite a few books, it would take me a couple minutes just to hold them all up here and read their titles, so I won’t do that, but people can find your bibliography. And you know, they take some settled awareness to read some of them because there’s some really deep stuff being discussed, but I found them fascinating and right up my alley in terms of the things that I like to understand better. Many others I think will too. So that’s it I guess for wrapping up.

Paul: Thank you. Well, it’s beautiful work that you’re doing, Rick, it’s really admirable, and I really just admire what you’ve been doing and bringing out these conversations, and it’s a great opportunity for people to hear so many different perspectives and points of view and to really consider for themselves, and for me it’s always this notion that each person really has to find that inside themselves, they have to decide for themselves. It’s not about what any one teacher or text says, it’s what ultimately resonates inside. So having access to a great variety of points of view, perspectives, arguments, understandings, experiences of life, and so on, it’s very rich and enriching. And so it’s beautiful work that you’re doing, and really congratulations on everything you’re doing. You were talking earlier about the hierarchical nature of the teacher-student relationship, and maybe we’re at a time where we should be more self-sufficient and so on, and I was just thinking about that, and that we should culture discrimination. I mean, we should hold teachers accountable, we should have the maturity not to get suckered in by something that’s going to waste our time and money or lead us astray, and so on. And I think people are realizing that as the decades progress and everyone becomes more experienced, sometimes through the school of hard knocks, but maybe some of those hard knocks can be avoided as we evolve as a spiritual culture.

Paul: It’s beautiful, well said.

Rick: Okay, so you’ve been listening to another interview on Buddha at the Gas Pump, number You referred to it as work, it’s not work, it’s play, although there’s some work behind the scenes. So we appreciate your listening or watching. Go to the website and see what’s there, you can sign up for the email notification, you can sign up for the audio podcast, there’s a donate button which we rely upon people clicking from time to time, and many other things. Just explore the menus and stay tuned for more. Thanks Paul.

Paul: Thank you so much, thank you so much, thank you so much. Wonderful, wonderful to talk with you today.

Rick: Thank you.