Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen are my home spiritual traditions. In these traditions, magic is fundamental to reality and mystical experience is what we humans call deeper contact with that reality.
In Trika, the supreme reality is personified as a self-aware magician and all of creation is a magical display made of the magician’s own self.
That is I [Lord Śiva], the divine magician.
Joined with time, I eternally
emit and absorb the entire world,
which is made up of magical power.Lord Śiva’s Song: The Īśvara Gītā. Translated by Andrew J. Nicholson.
Magical displays
The most basic magic is that worlds and beings and things appear out of the substrate of living awareness. There is something rather than nothing.
Beings and worlds are aspects of impermanence. But in both Trika and Dzogchen, these appearings are described as the ornaments or glamour of an alive aware, totally enlightened reality.
The magic of impermanence, the making of ephemeral art out of the awareness and energy of the supreme artist, is celebrated rather than mourned for its freedom of self-expression, jewel-like beauty, and wild diversity.
Trika describes the creation as a flashing forth and the diversity of life as a magical, magentizing city where we get to experience the appearing of others and enjoy diverse experiences and relationships.
Flat meet round
The flatworld is the world as seen through the eyes of cultures where scientific rationalism is the dominant paradigm; where the skills and knowledge of wisdom traditions honed over thousands of years are disparaged, regulated, and pillaged; and where there are impoverished or no working relationships with ancestors, dreams, divination, other realm beings, plant spirits, subtle energy, or just Nature.
Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen are roundworld traditions. Practitioners in these traditions cultivate relationships with both spiritual and familial ancestors. Other realm beings are perceivable and known to be sources of both wisdom and provocation. The direct wisdom encountered through spiritual practice outruns any local standards of intellectual or human scientific logic or proof.
Linear time comes to be known as an aspect of our lives in impermanence. Maha or Great Time is an all-at-once field of self-expression. Narratives of progress and improvement are totally local entertainments. Dreams are powerful vectors of learning and transformation.
Flying
Learning and practicing in these and similar traditions, we are told innumerable stories about adepts who can interact with life in magical ways. Some of these ways are: practicing subtle forms of communication, remote seeing, growing heavier or lighter or larger or smaller, appearing in two places at the same time, flying over canyons, walking through walls, eating enormous amounts of food or none at all, disappearing and reappearing, using mantras to effect magical transformations, and non-ordinary healing.
Each of my traditions holds in high regard those who recieve teachings and teaching texts through dreams and other non-ordinary means. Some of my own teachers have manifested these phenomena.
Transmission Magic
Transmission is the central practice, the field of practice, and the heart of every tradition I’ve studied.
The essence of transmission is the revelation of your real nature in the form of usable knowledge of reality. It is the revelation of wisdom.
Transmission, sometimes called shaktipat, is not about “giving” you energy or about cool sensory exeriences. It’s about relieving you of your experience of separation so that you can come into contact more deeply with who you really are. Experiencing the unbroken continuity of all life is the entryway and the vector for all transmission.
- Your own yearning to discover more of the nature of Reality, of the self, is shaktipat from Lord Shiva according to Abhinavagupta, one of the siddhas of Trika Shaivism.
- Your desire for teachings and to do sadhana is shaktipat.
- Transmission can occur in the field of a teacher when you are just hanging around.
- Transmission can be orchestrated formally by a teacher through touch, gaze, voice, symbol, or mind.
- Wisdom can be transmitted during the dream state or through other non-ordinary means. This includes the transmission of mantra and other practices, view teachings, and entire view and practice texts.
- Various forms of direct initiation can happen through the medium of a teacher or other being or via supranormal experiences, visions, and dreams.
Mind Games
The dominant culture of North America is flatworld. Our longing for magic has been relegated to the movies. What happens when flatworld-attached students practice or teach in roundworld traditions? Here are three options that I’ve observed.
Making it flat
The roundworld is forcibly rejected, and a flatworld view is imposed. Yoga asana becomes about stretching muscles. Meditation becomes about increasing productivity at work or smoothing out brain waves. Spiritual life is subjected to scientistic “standards of proof.” Epistemologies native to roundworld traditions are violently disparaged and excised. Aspects of roundworld traditions that are not in line with flatworld view, such as mantra, prayer, divination, astrology, ritual, and adept teachers, are simply removed.
Faking it round
The yearning for the roundworld emerges, but after a lifetime of flatworld acculturation, there is no or low confidence that it’s real or can be contacted. This lack of confidence in life and one’s own experience combined with yearning can cause one to imitate roundworld expressions of devotion toward teachers and enact fake piety. People sometimes generate fantasy spiritual experiences, are beset by self-defeating skepticism, or harbor despair that they will never “get it.”
One of the more troubling (to me) aspects of “faking it round” is the hugely prevalent practice of projecting concepts such as “totally enlightened” onto even relatively unaccomplished human teachers and of, in general, hyperbolizing the histories and accomplishments of teachers.
This is a very ordinary and limited way of relating to teachers that in the end has the opposite effect of what is intended.
Sobriety of view and clear seeing are the skills we want to cultivate if we want to realize. Projecting our yearning for perfect teachers sets us up for disappointment and discouragement if we later come to find out that the teachers we have idolized fall short of the projections. Then, if we project faux perfection onto our teachers, we block ourselves from appreciating their real condition—both extraordinary and mundane—as an expression of wisdom. This means we cannot bring our own varied condition onto the path either.
Finally, this kind of projection reinforces a dualistic way of relating to teachers; it reinforces the idea that siddhas or accomplished teachers are somehow made of different stuff than ordinary folk. In my traditions, we are trying to realize that we have the same essence nature as our teachers. We may not enjoy the same spiritual openings as our teachers in this lifetime, but we have that inherent capacity.
Competing with God
Pride and competitiveness are aspects of human experience that have been acknowledged in human cultural productions dating back thousands of years. In the Mahabharata, characters from different ages or yugas display pride in subtler ways. But now we are living at a time when pride and competitiveness are manifesting in their most gross form.
My students have surprised me when stories I’ve loved about great spiritual practitioners elicit feelings of shame or expressions of competitiveness in them. Shame is the underbelly of pride. Rather than feeling inspired, some students compare themselves to more accomplished practitioners and harshly judge themselves. They end up feeling defeated. Students who cannot tolerate these feelings sometimes push them away by becoming critical and skeptical.
A territory without a map
Since I was four or five years old, I’ve experienced roundworld phenomena. During my early years, I found those experiences to be fun or even occasionally wonderous, but I didn’t recognize their centrality to my life. I did recognize that I was driven by an unshakable confidence that what we see with our ordinary eyes is not all that is here and by the desire to find out what is “underneath” or “behind” it all.
When I was 15, I met a mystic who began to teach me how to more consciously engage with subtle energy and vision. Then, in my mid-twenties, I started doing more formal spiritual practice. I felt at times that the roundworld might take over my life, and I didn’t want it to. I wanted to dip in and out at will and not be too inconvenienced or “weird.” I had lots of regular goals and plans.
By the time I hit my early 40s, I was doing many hours a day of seated practice. Finally, I began to realize that my relationships to my teachers, both ancestral and present time, and the spiritual opportunities that came to me through dreams, esoteric healings and transmissions, divination, and other roundworld means were the wellspring of my life. The question eventually became one of how to most usefully share this wellspring.
I teach in the flatworld in a hugely competitive culture where self-image is always at stake, and spiritual fantasy abounds. Every day, I’m navigating terrain with my students that is just not accounted for or “mapped” in my traditions.
I’ve found that in order to chart the narrow pathway between hopeful fantasy and skepticism, between shame and disparagement, I often have to move cautiously and slowly. This can be painful, but it’s good medicine.
I’ve been divested of a certain giddy optimism that was its own form of fantasy. And we’ve all, my students and I, gained in modesty.
Starting with magic and ending with modesty is kind of odd. But that sense of modesty, of just being here and putting one foot in front of the other with whatever confidence and sincerity one can muster, is the only road to discovering the magic inherent in life just as it is and the occasional glamorous and utterly unexpected encounter with wisdom, too.
with much love,
Shambhavi
