Are you thinking about life, or are you living? Most people are consciously thinking about life and unconsciously living.

Tantra means the continuity of reality. There is freshness and originality to the situation of being alive and being aware in life.

In order to experience this freshness and originality, we have to step out of karma, out of time. Karma means habit patterns — good or bad.

Stepping out of time is not as hard as it sounds. For an instant. It’s just difficult to maintain. One way of describing the teacher-student relationship is that, on one level, it is happening outside of time and offering a gateway to timelessness.

Frankly, though, most of us are firmly convinced that our habits are who we are. So we don’t want to step out of our habits or time. From our limited perspective, stepping out of habit feels like dying.

And it is a dying. As Tantrikas, having the courage to let old forms of life die is absolutely necessary.  We have to cultivate this courage and revise our View of death.

When habit patterns are getting ready to die, they make a last stand. They become more intense. Part of maturing as a practitioner is being able to discern when this process of dying is occurring, and when we are just stuck in a pattern going nowhere.

On Thanksgiving eve, I dreamt that some old friends (aka old habits) were making a Thanksgiving feast, but I wasn’t invited. Right in the middle of this dream, I began to experience intense pain in my chest and an intense feeling of grief. I was aware in the dream of the karmic nature of this pain. Even while feeling this pain to the maximum, I also had some perspective on it. The pain was no longer “who I am.”

Doing sadhana (practice) enables one to have this kind of perspective, even in the midst of reactivity. So, at some point, I took a strong decision. I decided to leave the house of pain and go outside to explore.

Outside, everything was shimmering with fresh, vibrant life.

I saw lakes and mountains and trails. Small birds and other animals frolicked in grass sparkling with new rain. People’s faces were also eloquently expressive. At some point, I came upon a green, rolling park filled with diverse, beautiful animals, and a tiger was running, its stripes flashing out from between the trees.

I had no particular place to go and no expectations. I was just exploring and enjoying. Everything that occurred was full of interest, intelligence and immediacy.

This being in life, rather than thinking about life, occurs only when we leave the familiar “house of habits” and boldly step outside. We have to do this without knowing in advance what we will find.

Try to become and explorer of Self and life rather than a definer. Approach everything with an “I don’t know” attitude.

Trade in your knowing for real experiencing and a direct encounter with originality and freshness.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

Posted by Shambhavi on November 27th, 2009 | Explore More! Tags: death, Fixation