Paul Muller-Ortega Interview

Summary

The discussion explores Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism as traditions centered on consciousness, mantra, refinement, and freedom. It contrasts renunciatory spirituality with a nondual path that fully engages household life, desire, and creative action.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is Kashmir Shaivism and how does it differ from Advaita Vedanta?
• What does Tantra mean beyond sexual practices?
• Can householders pursue spiritual realization without renouncing ordinary life?
• How can spiritual practice transform desire, karma, and everyday action?

Key takeaways

• Kashmir Shaivism offers a nondual path intended for householders as well as renunciates.
• Tantra includes teachings on consciousness, mantra, language, refinement, and daily life.
• Its practice amplifies and refines individual life rather than simply erasing individuality.
• Desires and creative impulses can be purified and fulfilled instead of universally suppressed.
• The blue-throat myth symbolizes holding and transforming suffering and negative karma.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’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. 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 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.

The blue throat of Neelakantha

Blue Throat Yoga. 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—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, and 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 relationship. Usually they are great antagonists, but here they are cooperating. They turn a mountain upside down, wrap a serpent around the mountain, and create this churn, and all kinds of amazing things come out.

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, and many different things emerge in the story: the nine-trunked Airavata, an 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. 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. He holds it in his throat.

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, are being churned out and released in this way.

He holds it in his throat, and it stains his throat blue. This is a very, very old myth. It’s already present in the text of the Sri Rudram, which is at least 2,000, 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 an almost 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 metaphor of alchemy and of alchemical transmutation is part of what’s indicated here.

It’s also the connection of the throat to the mantra, the saying of the mantra, obviously at different levels of speech, and so on. So it’s always been an intriguing name for me.

When I retired from the university in 2009, I had taught for many years at the University of Rochester in New York. I began to teach and 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 why the gods and demons are always depicted as fighting or competing in these ancient texts, and he said something about how 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.

Tantra and Kashmir Shaivism

Rick: All right, 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 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. Starting at around the 3rd century of the Common Era, these texts begin to appear. They are not considered to be of human origin, and they 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. It’s most likely—I mean, it’s a sort of 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.

Absolute Consciousness in Shaiva Tantra

In the context of the Shaiva Tantric tradition, these texts are fundamentally about a very delimited number of things. They are about consciousness, and they teach the nature of absolute consciousness, known in the first one of the root texts of this tradition, which is called the Shiva Sutras, as 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 they obviously offer sadhanas, various different kinds of initiatory practices, as well as many rituals, as well as a whole system of daily life, and so on.

From these Agamas and Tantras, there then evolves a series of great masters who begin to write and comment on the teachings of these texts. 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.

Some of the themes that he talked about were 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 these texts, as do writings about other Goddesses, such as the Goddess Para, who is the embodiment of the supreme word of consciousness.

Within these texts, we also get really exquisite and very sophisticated teachings with regard to what is called Matrika Shakti. This is really the teaching of the nature of language and of the impulses of consciousness that create the structures of language and knowledge in a very, very beautiful array that parallels the structure of Sanskrit itself.

From this, there are two branches. One is obviously the understanding of ordinary conventional language: How does language function? How does it communicate meaning between human beings? But then there’s also the whole topic of mantra.

Really, these texts are among the most sophisticated and precise texts in which, 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, and so on.

They could really be called mantra shastra, or systematic knowledge with regard to mantra. Within that, 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? 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, and so on. They’re very, very beautiful teachings.

All of these then center on—I have to backtrack a little bit to talk about it—it is a tradition, a non-dual tradition that, however, is mostly, although not exclusively, centered on householder practitioners. I’ll talk about that more in a little detail.

🕊️ A lost householder tradition

Now, one of the things that happens historically is that this tradition gets lost. There are many, many reasons for this. One is that 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, was actually a hereditary title. It 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, learned, and enlightened masters lose the cultural and even economic context for their lives. It doesn’t become possible for the tradition to continue.

So within about 200 years of Abhinavagupta’s life, the tradition dies out almost entirely in the north of India. Previous to that, it had spread throughout all of India, and the influence and impact of these writings and texts is to be found all over. In many different places and libraries in India, the texts of this tradition are found.

But as a living initiatory esoteric lineage, the so-called Kashmir Shaiva tradition—which is really a modern term, not a very precise term, and has some problems—disappears, really. What happens is that the texts of the various branches, the various schools within so-called Kashmir Shaivism, are preserved in manuscript form in Srinagar. They’re copied and recopied and preserved as treasures, but 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.

In the early 20th century, the Maharaja of Kashmir finances a research project for the publication of these texts. Over the course of about 30 years, his small research department in Srinagar begins to publish, starting around 1918 and continuing into the 1930s and ’40s, prior to World War II. These books are then sent out to a variety of universities around the world, where most of them sort of languish in deep storage, 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 and just an exquisite professor, was a very lucky teacher for me to have. We were in, I don’t know, our third or fourth year of Sanskrit, and we went over to the library of the university. He showed us these 72 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, the reality principles in Samkhya, and where we get different versions of that.

One of the different versions we find is the 36 tattvas in the classical teachings of the so-called Kashmir Shaiva tradition. So, long story short, that’s where I was first introduced to this tradition in graduate school, and I’ve been pretty much fixated, 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. Pretty much, I would say, during 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 shastra, about this extraordinary technology of mantra in very acute and refined detail. There are very, very beautiful teachings there.

It’s about refinement, and it also offers an esoteric path for householders that is non-dual. 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.

One of the things that’s been lost—it’s recovered now, but historically was lost—is that there was a parallel tradition, which was this tradition of the so-called Kashmir Shaiva tradition. It was a non-dual tradition for householders, for householder practitioners, a parallel path. That parallel path for householders was lost in a certain sense, or at least it was lost from public view.

Obviously, there are always stewards and guardians behind the scenes, and teachers and so on, who are maintaining these things in some way or another. But in terms of widespread knowledge of Abhinavagupta, the predecessor teachers of Abhinavagupta who start out with these great teachers—Vasugupta, Somananda, and Utpaladeva, these extraordinary masters who write these exquisite texts, and so on—and then, subsequent to Abhinavagupta, there are several other teachers. Ksemaraja is one of the most famous ones, and he composes a text known as the Heart of Recognition, Pratyabhijnahrdayam.

Basically, the teachings of these masters are lost from view in a more widespread way. 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 formally becoming a sannyasi, was also something that was lost.

Householder Spirituality Beyond Renunciation

I think that one of the things that happens in popular culture, and even today in the widespread marketplace of spirituality, yoga, and so on, is that spirituality is still primarily understood almost exclusively in terms of renunciation and renunciatory practices. The idea that there is any such thing as a parallel path that involves householder practice is not widely understood.

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 a whole different set of possibilities.

I think this is one of the things that’s fascinated me: how to investigate this tradition, 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.

Renunciation, desire, and the rising wave

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.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that the Kashmir Shaivism tradition offers something for householders that’s on a parallel track but different from 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. I think that kind of filters down into people’s thinking and expectations and feeling, 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 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—is in terms of this fundamental metaphor of the ocean of consciousness and then a wave on the ocean of consciousness. This is a traditional Nyaya, or illustrative example, from the Shaiva tradition, where they talk about the great ocean rising up in waves.

The Ocean and Its 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.

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. They have a whole set of teachings with regard to why that forgetfulness happens, and so on.

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, 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 four. We can look at that also, if you want to.

However, the point I’m coming to is to say that, within the application of method or practice to the life wave, there are two different directions.

One says, “Now that wave has risen, therefore it must subside.” So the way for the wave to recapture its oceanic totality is to subside as an individual wave.

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 awareness, chitta vritti nirodha—is the definition of yoga. This has all been understood in terms of saying that 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 of teachings that, if one looks at renunciatory practice and 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, and 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 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, so that eventually the entire ocean will rise up into an individual wave.

Therefore, it’s a very different perspective.

So I talk about the life wave’s amplification and refinement. It isn’t just about drawing something; it also has to be refined. It has to be continuously refined through a series of stages in the journey of consciousness. That is exactly 180 degrees opposite in terms of the directionality of practice that’s involved.

It’s also 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 in 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 toward 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 can support that, rather than the notion in the renunciatory path, which is eradication? It’s really deracination—pulling everything up by its root, so there’s nothing left of any separate impulse.

And 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 these, 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 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 multitiered 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, “Established in yoga, perform action,” or “Yoga is skill in action,” and things like that.

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 accomplishing 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. That was the implication of spiritual development for the vast majority of people.

Paul: 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 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. 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.

Generally speaking, this idea of a householder esoteric path that is non-dual in its character has been lost. It’s been lost from view.

Part of what I think has happened over the last hundred years or so is the recovery of a somewhat lost tradition of so-called Kashmir Shaivism. 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, its teachings, and the writings of its masters, and so on, that offers us a very different picture and a very different perspective.

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.

One reality, many forms

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? There’s only one reality, and we shouldn’t get hung up in all these details, and so on. 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 with, 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 as the Ishta-Devata, the desired form of the deity that speaks to you most powerfully, 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.

Nevertheless, yes, it is clear that 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, et cetera and so on.

Clearly within that, however, even in the earliest teachings, there’s a notion that says there are 33 million faces of God, and there’s only 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, can appear, but all of them are really aspects or dimensions, facets or values of that ultimate reality that are then 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 our own 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 specific pathways, as it were, that are necessary for us. They provide the vocabulary for understanding a lot of this.

Progressive Development Through Knowledge and Experience

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 to that kind of notion. They say, again, “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’re 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. 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 anupaya, 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, and 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; 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 potentially be 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 are even born enlightened—the janma siddhas, as they’re called. They’re born already liberated, already free, and 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 that something is that must transpire.

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 entirely devoted to meditation—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 duality instantaneously 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 apace.

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 apace.

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 are two kinds of ignorance and there are 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 paurusha, or so-called spiritual ignorance, which is the absence of the knowledge of the transcendental self experientially. And then there’s bauddha, 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.”

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.

In that differential between their depth of spiritual immersion into reality, in a certain way, and the continuation of the animation of superficial or inadequate ways of thinking about all that and conceptualizing, they perpetuate a form of ignorance for themselves.

It’s only when … so therefore, Abhinavagupta’s teaching of the vikalpa 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 associated 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, 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.

It is just as important to have the experiential immersion in ultimacy, in absoluteness, and the digestion and continuous steeping and dyeing of the cloth of consciousness in that, as there is the notion of the process of refining how we’re thinking about it.

Hence, for this tradition, it is just as important to have the experiential immersion in ultimacy, in absoluteness, and the digestion and continuous steeping and dyeing 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 vikalpa samskara, which says, “Look, your mind ordinarily is going to animate limited knowledge.” The Shiva Sutra, the famous root text of the tradition, says, “Jnanam Bandha,” or “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 knowledge that is inadequate, crude or superficial, incomplete, insufficiently refined, potent, and aligned with—or congruent and in smooth coherence with—the ultimate reality itself.

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 they mutually nourish and feed each other. This is right at the beginning of the Tantraloka, and eventually 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, et cetera and so on.

It is only as the inner eye of experience is opened that we can actually really register the nuanced subtleties and in-depth precisions of what is 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 … I mean, that’s great. It’s a first start, 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.

Many of them are not only 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 get kind of uplifted and inspired by what they’re hearing, and they 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. This is the issue.

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 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, and so on.

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 it in the Buddhist tradition—but 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 in the current period of time.

There’s a sort of evolutionary process of maturation within all of these different traditions and schools, growing up to become more sophisticated, more refined, and more adapted to—Abhinavagupta talks about this at great length in his writings. He says, “You know, even if there is”—he talks about it and calls it the Saṃsiddhika 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.” It’s really considered to be the epitome of the highest kind of teacher, the Saṃsiddhika Guru.

However, he says, “Even the Saṃsiddhika 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 sattāraka—“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.

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.”

There’s a responsibility to this. However much there’s a freedom and a feeling—when I was a university professor, we used to read William James in theories of religion classes, and James talks about how mystical experience is self-validating. It has this quality that, when it rises up inside you, 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, the Shaiva tradition still 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, superficiality, or crudity of the sthūla 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.”

That’s where there’s work that needs to be done. It’s one of the reasons why this tradition is not intellectual. It’s a tradition that says you have to work on all of these different aspects of 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 having 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—it’s so that they become available as sources for checking against a particularly highly refined and sophisticated esoteric tradition that can offer a kind of mirror and also a safety check with regard to what it is that’s coming forward.

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.

Knowledge, science, and spontaneous insight

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. 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—the notion that whatever reality may be, 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 what quantum physics is trying to do. Actually, that’s beginning to cross over with quantum biology these days.

However, I think the quest of science is to ultimately arrive at some kind of consensus understanding of the nature of reality, with each branch contributing its own piece. I would think that spirituality could and should aspire to the same thing. There are so many traditions throughout the world, but really they’re all talking about the same reality ultimately, just coming at it from different traditions, different cultures, and different ages.

Then the two of those should be able to merge in some kind of grand unification. 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 in which we’ve really used subject and object as tools for 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? There are seven or eight or nine of them, depending on which different schools you look at, but basically it boils down to three.

They say, “Look, we gain knowledge in life through our senses,” and that’s called pratyaksha, “through our very eyes.” What’s in front of our eyes—eyes are the master sense for all 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 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 and 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. 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.

“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. This then creates an extraordinary consideration as to how it is that, using this instrument—you mentioned the nervous system, which is a very beautiful phrase—the physical and subtle bodies, as it were, and their state, knowledge can begin to arise spontaneously from within.

“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. 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 and 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.’”

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 rise 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—which is then concretized and rises up to become the madhyama, or intermediate dimension of thought. Then that has to be articulated in terms of speech, the Vaikuti, the spoken word.

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 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 an 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 that’s what emerges in that way.

So it’s a question of how we sufficiently clear out the instrument of the human body and the subtle nervous system and so on, such that 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 them.

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.

Those insights serve to guide, to orient, to inform, to inspire, and also to permit the shaping of any kind of degree of complexity of knowledge whatsoever. This is the way we understand it. 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.”

The aspiration isn’t just to meet such a master. The aspiration ultimately is to become such a being where that process can arise.

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. Then, as the process of the clarification and refinement of consciousness proceeds, so too, to an increasing degree, comes the ever more potent surging of different kinds of insights that narrate, in a certain sense, the nature of reality, the nature of the Absolute, the relationship of the Absolute to the relative manifested structures, and so on, and become the—so, yeah, anyway.

Abhinavagupta talks about this a thousand years ago in extraordinary detail. That’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s 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.”

Some people don’t like that notion because they’ve, like I said earlier, been 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. I’ve met some pretty interesting people, but I really feel like it’s a never-ending exploration.

If you read 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—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. 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 structural and chemical abnormalities in the nervous system that needed to be purified—chemical repair, chemical purification. These days, the term neuroplasticity is popular.

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 this is an old understanding, obviously, that says, “The presence of great masters on planet Earth has possibly been the salvation of the planet against annihilation.” Great beings, even in their silence, even beings who do not emerge to have a public teaching or agenda or whatever—the extraordinary purificatory potency of great enlightened masters on the planet has served as a countervailing impulse against the sheer 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 that have lined up to potentially kill us all, not only nuclear weapons but climate change and many, many other things.

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. It’s not a done deal, but it may be providing the potential antidote to some kind of really catastrophic thing.

Paul: Yes, and I think that when I was talking before about waves of teachers, at a certain moment, it’s not that the wave of teachers is necessarily going to stop, but it becomes more and more our responsibility.

In my own teaching about these things, I talk about the difference between childhood, adolescent, and adult or grown-up spirituality: the dependence of the child on the parents to solve all the problems, versus the grown-up who says, “Look, there aren’t any other grown-ups. We’re the grown-ups. We have to somehow take responsibility for these things.”

Householder Responsibility for the Planet

We can’t 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.

That’s also part of the understanding of householder spirituality. In other words, householders are here to develop a radical degree of creativity inside ourselves, and through that creativity there is the possibility of manifesting better things for our planet: better structures of society, economics, education, just getting along with each other, whatever it may be, the environment, and so on.

So there’s this notion—

Rick: Alternative energy, all kinds of things.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. This whole process of bhavana itself, that I was just 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. It is an endless well, and it is our responsibility to tap into that. Therefore, it’s extraordinarily important that more and more human beings awaken. You talked about more and more people awakening, and we know awakening is not the same as enlightenment.

Rick: There are many degrees of it.

Paul: Exactly. 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, and so on. That’s part of what’s taking place in a certain way right now. We see waves of individuals awakening in all of these different traditions and then being met with understandings that will help to transform and shape life.

For me, this understanding of householder esoteric nondual 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 as a skill in action, and it says, “How do you express that in the most complex ways, in the most varied sorts of ways?” 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, we’re here, and 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, some guru, or some avatar. No, it’s our job, as we awaken, as we grow, and as we mature in spirituality and in a householder path, to become responsible for the environment.

Householder spirituality is also about a kind of radical stewardship and protection. In other words, we’re here, and 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, some guru, or some avatar. No, it’s our job, as we awaken, as we grow, and as we mature in spirituality and 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 renunciates, 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: I was at the Science and Nonduality Conference one time, and a guy was up on stage who was a popular teacher and actually is a householder. 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. 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.”

That, to me, seemed inappropriate and unnecessary, and really not an attitude we want to promulgate. You can’t evolve spiritually unless you actually have a body and can breathe and can eat and so on. This is a marvelous place in which to accomplish spiritual evolution. Let’s keep it going.

Paul: That’s right. This is the sandhya time. Sandhya is the interval or transition time between the so-called Kali Yuga and the so-called Satya Yuga. We’re in this long period of transition, which is kind of betwixt and between. It’s not one and 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, the coming new day, and so on.

In that sandhya time, the betwixt-and-between time, which may last for a considerable period beyond our lifetimes, there is the establishment or setting up of those structures that are eventually going to result in a radically transformed culture, a radically transformed planet, and a radically transformed way that human beings will interact with each other, will live, will take care of the environment, and will manifest knowledge or creativity, the arts, or whatever it might be.

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, expressed in manifold ways.

One of the interesting things—it’s a detail, but one of the interesting things—is that I mentioned Abhinavagupta as a teacher who was kind of forgotten. The one place where he was remembered was in a kind of secondary agenda of his work, where he wrote about Indian aesthetics, the philosophy of art and artistic beauty. His theory of art, the Rasa-Dhvani theory, is actually 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?” It’s really an application of the whole spirituality of the Shaiva tradition, but that was kind of lost. Yet his aesthetic theory survived. He was open to the arts, open to creativity in that way, and open to all the ways that human beings seek to express themselves in life—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. It’s not an illusion. It’s real; it’s just relatively real, not absolutely real. There is 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 nondualistic teachings that are appropriate for renunciates, but you can’t live that way as a householder. It’s very difficult to tolerate.

Rick: There’s that famous saying by Shankara, which Ramana often quoted: “The world is illusory, Brahman alone is real, Brahman is the world.” Then there’s that notion of mithya, 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: With regard to your mention of Kali Yuga and Satya Yuga and so on, Kali Yuga is said to be 432,000 years long, and we’re only 5,000 years into it, supposedly. I don’t know if that chronology is actually correct, but I have heard it said that when dharma reaches its nadir, it may take a long time and a slow, gradual decline to get there, but then it sort of hits rock bottom and rises up to 100 percent restoration in a very short amount of time, like maybe a generation. Perhaps we’re beginning to see the signs of that. 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 the history of the universe, and so on. Rather, they are ways to understand the manifestations of time.

One of the meanings of Shiva is that he’s often called Mahakala, the great time. This notion of time manifests in different flavors. In modern times, we just say, “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 what this teaching of the Kali Yuga, Satya Yuga, Dvapara, and Treta is about. They are ways of expressing this notion of a pulsating, transforming, evolving, and devolving structure.

What’s interesting about this theory of time is that things get worse over time. The Satya 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. How long that’s going to take to happen is also a question of how long according to whom. In other words, are we talking human years or divine years?

For me, sometimes people have said, “The quotient 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 the range of the ordinary predictability of our mind. But we’re on the verge of something astonishing, and there are waves of spiritually awakening human beings—awakening, being born, and so on. This is part of what we’re in the midst of.

It’s almost like a planetary emergency. It’s not as if we have all these perfect schools, perfect teachings, and perfectly orderly things. It’s just that every single tradition is doing the best it can to manifest and express what it possibly can and add to the collective discourse in that way.

I think that’s the way I see it in terms of this Kashmir Shaiva tradition. It is very, very beautiful, extraordinarily inspiring, and necessary for us to understand.

Gross, subtle, and transcendent reality

Rick: 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 it. 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: 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 able, in a scholarly sort of way, to present a point-by-point comparison.

It’s always fascinating when you get these parallel sorts of appearances of teachings where it seems like something echoes with something else. 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. I think that, yeah.

Rick: 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 reverse march of one’s experience from gross to subtle. The whole implication of the power of the subtle as compared to the gross, and many other things that I’m sure you could say about it. Let’s talk about that stuff for a minute.

Vibratory Bands of Manifested Reality

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 gross or crude, objective, superficial, and fully manifested in a certain kind of way.

There are bands of the subtle, sukshma; bands of the extremely subtle, atisukshma; and then, beyond all of that, something that transcends the whole structure. It could be called atita, which just means utterly beyond, or para, the supreme, or whatever.

It’s a fundamental, extraordinarily useful map of both a kind of cosmic reality as well as 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?”

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,” 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.

Then there’s something extraordinarily subtle, and we, as individuals, are multidimensional beings. We exist on all those levels, except that most of the time we’ve forgotten, neglected, really ignored, or simply do not have systematic access to those more interior, more subtle, or higher vibratory levels.

The notion that says, “Well, the Spanda teaching”—this is where it comes from, the Shaiva tradition—is 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.” 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 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. Why does that all happen? As it emerges, it emerges first at this level of what I usually talk about as “ati-ati sukshma,” extraordinarily, extraordinarily subtle.

What Abhinavagupta talks about there is this: “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 the Anakhya 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.

The teachings of Kali in the Shaiva tradition are totally related to the understanding of this Anakhya Shakti Chakra. We talk about the twelve different forms of Kali, et cetera. 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, automatically, and sequentially? This is one of the other great teachings of the Shaiva tradition: the teaching of Krama, or sequentiality. From the non-sequential, absolute, formless, timeless space of the Absolute, there emerges sequentiality.

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. These are two parallel tracks of emergence that are happening.

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. So there is the expression of the pashyanti vak, the visioning word that is part and parcel of this indescribable vortex wheel of power.

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, coagulation, 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, 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, at the individual level, we have the cosmic process of manifestation: the manifestation of individual life waves, or what are called anu, individual transmigrating individual selves—the anu.

The anu 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—not karma, but karma with a long a—the agency, the sense of agency.

Within ourselves, we have a place inside ourselves where we feel incomplete, inadequate, and not whole. It creates a problem; it creates a difficulty; it creates stress; it creates fear or anxiety. It also creates the absence of full knowledge, and it 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. Whether it actually fills it or not is a separate question.

So, you have the anava mala, and then you have the maya mala, which creates difference. The focus or emphasis of the anu is on difference. Consciousness is predominantly focused on difference in a certain kind of way; it loses track or sight of the underlying or subjacent unity, and the thread of nonduality is lost.

Then it also creates the sensation of arrogating to ourselves our sense of agency. “I’m doing this”—the karma mala says inside ourselves, “I’m doing this.” Whereas really, what’s doing it is this freestanding, 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.” That creates the anu, the transmigrating self, in that way.

Then the entire journey—and Abhinavagupta, as a great Shaiva theologian and master, gets asked questions, basically. He asks the questions himself and then answers his own questions. Basically, “Why does this all happen?”

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 svatantrya, of that. If reality were only constrained to be absolute, there would be 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 of 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, problematic curse or anything like that. It is simply the expression of the freedom that wants to express itself and, indeed, encapsulates—Shiva-Shakti would say, encapsulates himself or herself—within all of these transmigrating beings in that way.

It’s an incredibly beautiful teaching. It’s not out of some mistake; it’s not some error; it’s not some fundamental, problematic curse or anything like that. It is simply the expression of the freedom that wants to express itself and, indeed, encapsulates—Shiva-Shakti would say, encapsulates himself or herself—within all of these transmigrating beings in that way.

However, once that’s happened, those beings, in the forgetfulness—in the Nataraja murtis, you have Shiva dancing on this little figure of the Apasmara. The dwarf of forgetfulness is called the Apasmara. 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, et cetera, and so on. 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, “Prakriti-mri-svam avashtavya vishwajami punah punah,” taking recourse to myself, or curving back on myself, I create again and again.

It’s this thing about the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness that creates this sort of threefold structure within the oneness and results in the whole diversification and emergence of creation.

It’s funny, and it’s interesting also to note that in physics they have this thing called—what is it called?—spontaneous sequential symmetry breaking, or something like that, where the 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 is, 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 multidimensional beings, would you say that a good definition of an enlightened person might be someone who has fully realized their multidimensionality?

In other words, 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 needs 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, they talk about the turiya state, a fourth state of consciousness, which is also talked about in the Vedantic texts, 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. This 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.

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.

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 this.

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. 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, 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, 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,” and so on.

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, people say, “Well, that’s a closed-ended thing.” It’s not closed-ended. It’s just that, at a certain moment, 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.

I think that the study of great beings and masters and so on—it’s often, as you mentioned before, and I agree, the case that a master will say, “Well, this was when I achieved full enlightenment.” Then, if one studies the life of that individual, one sees that they kept on growing, kept on modifying their teachings, and kept on evolving further into more expansive, more subtle expressions and articulations of the whole matter. They 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 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. You referred to self-realization, but that doesn’t necessarily imply appreciating the full value of the object of experience. 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 essentially the very same stuff as the self which has been realized. 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.

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 is that you have classical yoga as one of the six darshana, shuddh darshana systems, and then you have, almost in parallel but moving on centuries afterward, the evolution of Shaiva tantra.

The difference is 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 is kind of like this: In order for a person to learn calculus, they need to know some basic mathematics, some algebra, some trigonometry, and so on. Only then can they begin to understand calculus, higher calculus, or whatever higher forms of mathematics even exist.

You have to have that foundation, so that the dualistic rising to the atma-vyapti—which could be, I know, depicted in different ways; I bow to those interpretations, but I’m just saying it seems like a prima facie reading of Kaivalya—is this state of the separateness of the purusha from all the prakritic structures of the individual body-mind.

That then forms a platform and foundation on which the practice that’s going to happen is going to be extroversive. In other words, there’s going to be a movement from the purusha into the prakritic, which is not really kosher, not really permitted within the classical yoga system. The movement of consciousness that begins to breach the separation of those two, and 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 Kaivalya 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. It’s not like it’s emanating out from us into it. It’s that we’re realizing more and more, more subtly and deeply, that 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 Vama and Jyeshta Currents

“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 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 Saṅkoca-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.

It’s not a question of fighting. Sometimes I use these silly analogies in talking about this: the Vama current is kind of like trying to go up the down escalator.

So it’s not a question of fighting. 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 increasingly subtle levels and takes us eventually to merge our attention 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 nondual, 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. All are 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 ask about 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.

This Raudri current then is what is at play, particularly starting at the level of this attainment of the Apti. 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 the highest possibilities, vessels for extraordinary natural virtues, vessels for inspiration and insight and wisdom, vessels for every possible form of outward expression.

And this Raudri 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, and we are beginning to see the value, the deeper value, the deepest values.

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—Maharishi 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 tantrikas as Rasikas, people who taste both the Celestial and also eventually the nondual within every experience of life altogether.

And so, I mean, there are exquisite teachings within that.

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 the 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 is that 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, 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 move. So consciousness as the maha-prakasha, as the great light, then is shaping itself as our individual awareness. But the inherent nature—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.”

The question then is, what is the directionality for that movement toward expansion going to take? 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. As our mind registers that, the mind spontaneously wants to get absorbed within it.

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 gives. As a result of that, eventually we experience—I’ve mentioned before—hridaya vishanti. We learn how to repose or rest in the heart, here “heart” not meaning the physical heart chakra but really the absoluteness itself.

Within that, there’s a lot to talk about here, but there are 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 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 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? 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 that it distinguishes between what it calls natural and spontaneous practice versus artificial and synthetic practices. They’re both categories of practice, but it’s saying that the higher—in Sanskrit, it’s called akritrima—are those practices that harness the natural, inherent nature of the body and the mind. Then they function not on the basis of individual genius or skill or predilection or taste or whatever, but by harnessing the inherent nature of what is there: the svabhavata of the mind, which is its sphurata value, this incandescent pulsation; and the svabhavata of the body, which is the soma value.

It is that increased range of operation of the soma value which then goes to work, basically doing what you were talking about before—the releasing of everything that’s been accumulated inside. So it’s an extraordinary understanding of the autonomous, spontaneous nature of this natural intelligence of the body. Given a wider range of operation, it does automatically what is necessary to transform and transmute, rather than requiring us to do it. 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: “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. What more can you tell people about the nature of the practice, the routine of it, how much 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 a mantra contains 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 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 and can move up to 45 minutes as people advance more and more, but it involves supporting people to the point where they become autonomous or self-sufficient in their practice. 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?

I was a full professor at the University of Rochester. 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. 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 continuing 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 I want to offer people in different modalities. There are different branches, there are different schools, 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 take us in.

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 that 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, and it comes out colored, whatever. But there’s this soaking up of this inner beauty, and then 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 that 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.

Shaktipata and the limbs of yoga

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 understanding it. You say that Abhinavagupta, if I’m pronouncing his name right, sort of took issue with the Yoga Sutras and the way they were traditionally understood, and he rejected the notion, as I understood what you were saying, that the limbs of yoga, as Patanjali outlined them, grow sequentially.

I got the sense that you were saying that they actually grow simultaneously, as do the limbs in a body, as when an embryo turns into a fetus and then 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, 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 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 Shaktipata, 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?

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 we experience that as human beings in the sense of a kind of trajectory of life, in which, at a certain moment, something begins to happen inside us that is radically impelling us from the deepest levels inside us toward a transformed outlook on life, a transformed perspective on what we want to do with our life, and toward opening us and making us interested in dimensions of life and dimensions of existence that previously, before that, may have been absolutely uninteresting to us.

And this he calls Shaktipata. There’s a whole investigation into what causes Shaktipata, how it moves, what the different stages of Shaktipata are, what the different levels of intensity of Shaktipata are, and so on. But the bottom line is that, basically, it is that—if we want to use the term “awakening”—this burgeoning, opening, and blossoming from inside of an increased vibrancy, luminosity, and potency of consciousness is going to begin to move the individual from deep inside toward a trajectory of seeking out a path, a sequence of teachings, a sequence of teachers, and so on, and will in fact be the basis and foundation for that individual then investing themselves in their life through practice.

Shaktipata is sometimes understood as a kind of initiation that a teacher gives. That’s also an understanding that the 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, limited, and even imprisoned within this anu, this limited transmigrating individual manifesting ignorance, limitation, the absence of knowledge, and so on—suddenly something from within the core of that individual begins to burgeon, begins to move, and begins to transform and change.

I talk about it sometimes as when there’s a kind of 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 possibly doesn’t even exist or take place within the level of relative individuality. It’s on the borderline of individuality and the absoluteness of the individual. Some fundamental, radical transmutation of that relationship begins to release the constricting power of the malas, these constricting rings of limitation.

On that basis, and on that basis alone, he argues, 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 Shaktipata. 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, and so on. It’s all on the basis of this surging impulse of the movement of freedom from inside that has previously 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 radical—it’s the beginning of the movement of that Raudry Current that we talked about before. It’s downstreaming into the individual to impel that individual toward transformation.

And then you have the destiny of that individual, the karma of that individual, and the past connections of that individual that lead that individual out into relationships with teachers, traditions, different lineage streams, and different sorts of expressions that might be there. It’s the complex, indescribable play of karma that comes in at that point—the destiny of the individual, led into 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 also, in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, as well as in the various commentaries of Vyasa Bhashya and so on, there is no explicit concept of grace in this text. Later commentators have wanted to read it back in, mainly because of the evolution of the Shaiva tradition, which 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,” and so on. 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, the Patanjali, is the whole idea of the correlation between all the different values of life, such as ethical behavior and the growth of Samadhi. Some teachers have said, “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 who 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-synchness 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 tightrope tying these things together, or a big, stretchy rubber band?

Paul: Well, it’s just different aspects that, you know, eventually—yes, 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, these are the saintly virtues: the capacity for love, the capacity for patience, compassion, forgiveness, extraordinary selflessness, and so on.

These are also expressions of the higher manifestations 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.

Certainty, wonder, and astonishment

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’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—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… Nisargadatta said something along the lines 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, 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 within that, we were also 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.

The stations and stages of yoga are marked by the experience of surprise, wonder, and blissful astonishment.

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. Somebody I interviewed a couple of years ago recently committed suicide, and he had been suffering some rather severe pain, but something that perhaps could have been solved. 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, and I really like things that help to give people a clear conception of what the possibilities are, of what enlightenment might actually be, so it doesn’t get shortchanged, and so we don’t think of it as something that’s hardly an improvement on what many of us are already experiencing, 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’d 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. They can go to bluethroatyoga.com and find out more about you, get in touch, and figure out how to learn your meditation. I’ll be linking to that, of course, from your page on BatGap.

You have quite a few books. It would take me a couple of 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, 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. It’s a great opportunity for people to hear so many different perspectives and points of view, and to really consider for themselves.

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, is 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. I was just thinking about that, and that we should cultivate 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 417. 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, and 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.