Advaita Vedanta, Prayer, and Austerities

STUDENT 1
I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about the Advaita Vedanta practice and how that is similar and very different from the ways that you're practicing in this tradition.

SHAMBHAVI
This tradition, Trika, has a very long history of being in conversation with Advaita Vedanta, going back to the 10th, 11th centuries.

And Abhinavagupta, one of the people that synthesized the modern tradition that we have, sort of had this respect, but also loved to poke fun at Advaita Vedanta. Like a cute little sibling that he didn't quite take seriously, but they were fun anyway.

Basically, these are both called nondual traditions. That isn't really quite true of either tradition, but in a different way.

What Abhinavagupta, his criticism of Advaita Vedanta, was, first of all, that it was transcendental. It separated the divine from the mundane, even though it says it's a nondual tradition, by making a division between the real and the unreal, and most importantly, by disparaging the lived experience, the mundane world.

There's two things going on with Advaita.

And Advaita Vedanta is a huge swath of Indian spiritual observances and lineages, so you can't really say one thing about it. I'm sure there are people practicing and teaching Advaita Vedanta who aren't as crude as what Abhinavagupta was poking fun at.

But in general, there's two things happening. One is that it's, sort of in terms of View, what Abhinavagupta said, this is more sort of the absolute thing. If you separate things into real and unreal, first of all, the unreal cannot exist.

There's no referent to the word unreal. It doesn't refer to anything. And it can't exist. So to call something unreal doesn't make any sense. And what he said is one of the fundamental tenets of this kind of tradition, which is that everything is real. Only the real can exist.

We can have misperceptions of things, but those misperceptions are REAL misperceptions. They are real experiences, basically.

For instance, that famous Indian example of walking along a road and seeing a rope in the road and mistaking it for a snake. This is often used in Advaita Vedanta teachings to explain what it means to be deluded.

But what we would say about that is you're having a real experience of a snake until you realize it's a rope, and then you're having an experience of a rope.

And neither of them is really any different from the other, because everything is experience. Everything that's going on here is an experience. It's not an object.

So an experience of a rope is not really different ontologically, or at the level of being, or existence itself. It's not really different from an experience of a snake that is a mistaken perception. They're really equal experiences.

So there's nothing unreal about either of them. Or they're both unreal, I mean, it doesn't matter. But they're both basically experiences being produced in the awareness of this alive, aware reality. So they have total equality. That's what Abhinavagupta would say.

You know, we have a dream, and in the dream, we see actual seeings, and we feel actual feelings, and we have actual reactions to things. Those are all real.

We don't wake up and say, oh, that experience of fear in my dream was unreal. We know it was a real experience of fear. If we have an orgasm in our sleep, it's actually an orgasm. It's not an unreal orgasm. [laughs] Just trying to use the example that makes it the clearest.

That dream is a real dream, and it's a real experience of a dream.

It's different in a superficial way from the experience we're having right now because our senses, our perceptions, are operating somewhat differently when we're awake. But on the level of its being-ness, they're the same. They have total equality.

So Abhinavagupta said there just is no such thing as the unreal, first of all. So that's one big point of difference.

And then the other point has to do with tone. A tone that is really coming out of what is the way that transcendental traditions all over the world, how they relate to lived experience in the mundane everyday world. Which is, generally they disparage it.

So there's something lesser-than about this experience that we're having now. It's degraded in comparison to some other kind of more spiritual thing happening.

Abhinavagupta also said that is completely untenable if you're going to call something a nondual tradition. If everything is God, there's no difference between eating a donut and going to church, I'm sorry. [laughs]

If you are aware of the real nature of things and the real nature of the Self, eating a donut is just as holy as going to church. So there's no way that the physical experience of bodies and the experience of deities is really different on that level.

What I would say is that Trika is much more thoroughgoing in its nondualism. Much more thoroughgoing. And it does not have all of the cultural baggage of transcendental traditions that are basically saying there's something dirty and ewwy about bodies, sex, and lived experience.

It's very celebratory, in fact, of lived experience. And this is the whole reason why it even has this idea of jivanmukti.

In most transcendental traditions, you just go somewhere else to be enlightened. Bramha Loka, for instance. But in this tradition, you basically become more realized, and you stay here and enjoy this.

This is what's called jivanmukti, liberated in life. And that is considered to be the pinnacle of realization. Not going off somewhere to some pink cloud zone. Not leaving this behind, but experiencing this as God, basically, and then enjoying it.

So there's really none of the finger wagging of a lot of Advaita Vedantists about the degraded quality of this experience. It only feels that way because of our limited perceptions.

And the whole point of practice is to remove the limitations of our perceptions so that we can experience this as God, as the magic of this reality.

And this is the same in Dzogchen, the exact same teaching. And Ma also was just totally and completely thoroughgoing in recognizing everything as 'that'.

There's one more distinction, which is, Advaita Vedanta sadhana tends to be much more mental. Tends to be much more based in mind, and mentation. And this tradition tends to be much more based in a fuller experience of perception.

STUDENT 2
Could you to talk a little bit about the difference and overlap between prayer and meditation? I've heard in other spaces that meditation is like attuning the receptors to God, and then prayer is having the conversation.

SHAMBHAVI
When we have more accomplishment, what we discover is that every single practice we do is devotional. Every single practice is puja, an offering. Every single practice could be called prayer.

We discover that even in nadi shodhana, even in the practices that have more technique. Those are the places where we really enter into knowledge of reality, knowledge of the Self, knowledge of what's happening here, knowledge of the nature of things.

And when that happens spontaneously, we recognize that every single thing we're doing is devotional.

Prayer isn't just about asking for something. Prayer is also a form of yajña, of offering, the pouring the self into the Self. Because when we're deep in a state of prayerfulness, we are experiencing more immersion in the Self, and we're being just in a state of devotion.

So, everything is that. And this is part of the creativity of sadhana, where.... It's not creativity like we decide we're going to do something, but it's more like a flow where you're doing something, and then all of a sudden, you just find yourself asking for other people to benefit. In a natural way.

Sometimes, especially if we do a dedication, we might as well just be saying, yada, yada, yada, most of you. Because you're not feeling yourself in a state of dedication. You're not being deep in your heart, really, really wanting other people to have benefit. You're just like, okay, yada, yada, yada.

But if we can reach that place just spontaneously in our sadhana, we're doing great. That's really great.

Somebody once said to me, and I really don't remember who this was, and I don't even remember the context, but.... Somebody who was doing a reading or, I don't know what they were doing. Maybe it was a dream. I don't even know. [laughs]

But they said, your job in this life is to make your whole body a prayer.

And I wrote a doha about that, which is on the website. And that's basically it. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says, a realized person, everything they do is yajña. Everything they do is an offering of self into Self.

Whether they're cooking, or dancing, or praying, or sitting around watching science fiction. [laughs] That sense of offering never leaves. That sense of prayerfulness or devotion never leaves after a time. That's actually the goal.

But because these kinds of traditions—including Dzogchen, which is even less explicitly devotional—they can be very technique-y. There can be a lot of really complex things that we do.

And so people can get very caught up in that being the point, like what very complex things they accomplish and how many times they did it over how many years, and what visions they had and blah, blah, blah, blah.

But when I hear people talking like that, it's just a phase that people go through. It's fine. It does motivate people to practice more.

But ultimately, if you aren't doing it for others naturally, just in a natural way, you haven't really arrived. But you're still doing it for the greater glory of your kundalini or something like that. [laughs]

Some idea that you're going to have some experience or that's what it's about, you having an experience. Then you really haven't arrived.

STUDENT 3
Can you talk a little bit about external signifiers of offerings or physical offerings, or even personal sacrifices and austerities?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, if you want to make external offerings and you want to do austerities, then that's an important part of your practice. Whatever magnetizes you or attracts you to doing practice is pointing you in the direction that you should go.

Even from the beginning, though, when we're learning about making external offerings, we're learning that they represent the five elements and that they're aspects of offering self to Self.

So when we do offerings in a nondual tradition, we're not having the idea that anything on the altar, anything we're offering the guru or the deity, we're not having the idea that those are different objects that we're working with.

We're having the orientation that all of them are Self. And eventually, that will be real to you. If you stick with it. If you don't, all bets are off. [laughs]

So you should do what pleases you, and that will keep you practicing. And all those things are very beautiful when we have lots of external things to play with. That's very, very beautiful.

And even when we're more realized, it's still fun and beautiful to handle those things and make those offerings, but it'll just feel very different. We won't have that feeling that we have to do it or we'll get into trouble or something like that.

In terms of austerities, Ma often had people undertake austerities. It's a way of loosening our grip on our self-definitions and our self-concepts. But if we start taking pride in them and measuring them and bragging about them, of course, that's no good.

But one of the austerities that Ma made somebody do was to spend a whole year not talking to anybody that they know. Not even being seen by anybody that they know.

There's a story about one time this fellow that she had given this austerity to. He was in Rishikesh, and Ma's entourage arrived there, and he had to hide from his own teacher the whole time in order to follow her instructions.

So, instead of saying, yes, I want you to go meditate in a cave for a year and make sure to take lots of selfies and put them on Facebook. What if someone told you, I want you to do this extremely difficult thing for a whole year, and I don't want you to be seen by anybody, to talk to anybody about it, or advertise that you're doing it in any way?

That would be a good austerity for lots of us.