Chaos and Participation

STUDENT 1
Will you talk about chaos?

SHAMBHAVI
Well one time I had a dream. This is the first time I started thinking about chaos when I had this dream many, many, many years ago.

I was in the forest, and I wandered into this ritual that these women were conducting. They were kinda annoyed with me because I wasn't supposed to be there, like it was just accidental that I ended up wherever they were doing their ritual.

And they were like, 'Well, now that you're here, we have to include you.' [laughs] And they included me and then so I was part of this whole ritual. Then at the end, they had me lie down on this log, and this woman came over to me and said, "Nothing can be complete or no realization can be complete without chaos."

She moved her hands over my body and just this chaos started manifesting in my body as all these chaotic forms and chaotic energies. And that was like the end of the ritual.

Of course, chaos is an aspect of destruction, but it's also an aspect of freedom. We can think of chaos as being both what happens when things fall apart and as the space that happens between structures when structures fall apart.

Structures being concepts also, not just physical things. Structures of emotional patterns, structures of self-definition, structures of subcultures, and literal physical structures, and the structure of our body and when our house burns down.

So all of these things are related to chaos. Of course, when there's chaos, there's opportunity. There's opportunity in the space that is created and the way that things are not fixed or settled anymore.

This is why chaos is absolutely necessary. It's absolutely necessary for us to, as practitioners, to recognize recognize when chaos is happening, both for us just personally, things just get disorganized, or when it's happening on a large scale, like it's happening right now.

It's important to recognize that this represents an opportunity to realize more wisdom. In that space, we can contact more wisdom. Less fettered wisdom, less constrained wisdom, less conditioned wisdom.

This is a fundamental principle of sadhana in the direct realization traditions that we practice in what's called the sandhi. The sandhi means the gap between things. It means a juncture where one thing has ended and another thing hasn't quite begun.

And in that space, we can have more easy access to the unconditional, to the absolute. So that space is created when we have chaos.

It's created in other, many, many other ways, too. But we can think of chaos as producing sandhis. Something is destroyed and something else hasn't quite come to be yet.

And there's a sense of possibility and openness, possibility for more wisdom to manifest in the world. So it's important for us as practitioners when chaos happens in our own personal lives or in our practice. When things that we felt or thought about ourselves as practitioners or people starts to go all wonky.

It's important for us to be acclimatized to chaos or to destruction, I would say. They're sort of adjacent. It's important for us to run toward it, not run away from it, and kind of get used to it and get to know it and learn how to work with it and learn what the opportunities of chaos are.

So that we can mine the most out of that very pregnant kind of experience.

I often advise people when their lives are falling apart or they're having a rough time in their practice or something like that, don't try to put things back together too quickly.

Don't go back to the way things were. Try to remain in this less structured, less conditioned place and see what emerges from it.

It's very, very important. It's a big skill to be able to do that because most people are you know, 'let me put this back together the same way as quickly as possible.'

STUDENT 2
If someone is very unpredictable and chaotic, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're realized or without karma, right?

SHAMBHAVI
No, it does not. [laughs] Absolutely. It usually means their vata is way too high.

Now, there is creation, there is maintenance, there is destruction. You want to have all of those modes at your disposal. You want to be able to create things and create structure. You want to be able to maintain things that are valuable to maintain, and you want to be able to destroy shit that needs to be destroyed.

So just being full-time chaotic and destructive is not embodying self-realization.

STUDENT 3
Kind of related to chaos, could you speak about accidents?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I mean, the idea that we have planned things and they worked out because we planned them is a complete misperception. [laughs]

In a sense, everything is accidental from a human perspective, in that we have very, very little control over what happens. And everything is sort of coalescing from infinite forms of call and response. And there isn't really an accident, but it's definitely not planned by us.

Every single thing that happens is not planned by us, mostly. We just have a small little part to play.

But accidents are also the times of possibility. When something gets radically interrupted and the pieces just seem to get scattered all over the place.

And what happens when that happens? Well, I mean, there's minor accidents and there's major accidents, right? Occasionally, I've broken a bone and ended up in an emergency room. And those are not major accidents. Those are minor accidents.

And every time I end up in the emergency room, I always have the same experience, which is the sense of wonder that my day was going one way, and then all of a sudden it got tossed. And now I'm somewhere I didn't expect to be at all.

And I always take a certain amount of pleasure from that, even though I don't want to have a broken bone. But there is something pleasurable about having your day totally derailed [laughs]. Even by an accident.

Of course, there can be much more serious accidents. And even in those situations, these are times when we can re-evaluate, rethink, redirect. We're called upon to have greater wisdom in our lives, greater sobriety.

In a sense, when everything's just going along as it normally does, it's possible to just fall into karmic habit pattern grooves and not even be aware of it.

Or not even have the 'oomph' to try to change those things because we get comfortable in our rut, right? But then something comes and shakes it up like an accident.

Even though some accidents may be the occasions for a lot of grief and fear and pain, they also still have that opportunity for re-evaluation, bringing more wisdom to play, a sort of freshness that might not have been there before.

And so we should always be looking to take advantage of that. And this is not spiritual bypassing. So I am not saying, 'Oh, it's all fresh and new and all wonderful, and we should only look at the opportunity.'

There's also opportunity in just letting ourselves feel what we feel. There's nothing wrong or unspiritual about feeling afraid or feeling pain or feeling confusion or anything like that.

We should, in every circumstance, let ourselves take out the reins, take out the bridle out of our mouths. Just be ourselves.

Because it's only by just letting ourselves be in situations and not having these judgments about how we're supposed to be that we can actually mine the full possibility of every situation.

All the energy we spend being contrived, we're trying to control responses to things based on concepts. All that energy just takes away opportunity, right? It's just wasted.

Even in the most extreme situations, there's opportunity. We know that because, as I've brought up many times before, there's people who have been in labor camps and concentration camps and imprisoned in other ways who have found and written about, taught about the tremendous opportunity that they discovered in those very terrible situations.

There's no red line where we would say, 'Oh, no, this is just terrible. There's no opportunity here.' There's always opportunity. When things very severely go wrong, then there's going to be very, very profound shifts in our lives.

We're kind of forced to look at the nuts and bolts of things and of ourselves. Whereas sometimes we can just skim along and skate along in a very superficial way when things are going well.

Patrul Rinpoche, one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, has a wonderful—I guess it's kind of a poem, I don't know—but I don't know it by heart.

But it's "When you have a claim, it's bad. When you're being criticized, it's good." He lists all these things that we normally think are bad and says they're all good.

Because when everything's going well, we just turn into blobs. But when things are going wrong, we have these periods of growth and self-examination and getting back to more reality.

STUDENT 4
You're talking about allowing yourself to feel things that you're feeling. If you're also having some karmic response to it, you're not talking about just letting that be as it is, though, right? That you would be working with.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, but you have to let yourself feel it in order to work with it. You can't beat yourself out of karma with concepts. 'I shouldn't be this way. I should be that way. This is spiritual. That's not spiritual.'

Those things are never going to resolve karmas, those ways of relating to things. Of course, in this tradition and in other direct realization traditions, when we're having karmic emotional reactions to things and we recognize it like, 'Oh, here's that old stale thing again,' what do we do?

We apply practice. We don't apply concepts. We apply something very concrete from our sadhana that doesn't involve lecturing ourselves.

And so in doing that, we're trying to actually redirect, interrupt that pattern, redirect that energy, reclaim that energy, rather than just talking it to death.

And slowly over time, when we keep doing that, those things weaken.

There can be rest in any circumstance, because that's one way of talking about self-realization. You're being immersed and resting in living presence regardless of what's happening.

And then you have a lot of skill in working with chaos, a tremendous amount of skill. Absolutely.

For ordinary folk who are engaged in practice, who have View of some sort, we can at least remind ourselves that all of this is natural.

We don't have to do the spiritual bypass-y thing and say it's all good. I can say that because I actually have contact with that. But sometimes other people are saying that and they're just being bypass-y, right? So we have to watch out for that.

But at the very least, we can understand that all of these different occurrences in life are all part of nature. They're all part of the nature of life, and there's nothing that's out of bounds. There's nothing that somehow shouldn't be happening, right?

Nonetheless, we're still working with everything that's happening, even though we're not saying it shouldn't be happening. So what's happening is happening and our responses to it are our responses to it, and we work with those.

But within that, we can feel some restfulness knowing that we're just being moved to participate.

I was talking about this with Jacob Kyle because we did a podcast recording the other day, and he asked me why I was participating in political life, basically public life.

And I said, 'Well, it's not because of ethics or morals. It's because I just feel profoundly moved to do it.' And when you just let yourself be moved, there doesn't have to be any other reason for it. You just feel things and you want to participate.

Then that actually is a place of greater restfulness because there's no sense that you're doing anything important or that you have to do it. It's more like, this is my nature. This is part of my unique dimension.

I mean, I've always known that about myself, that I just love participating in lots of different things. That is just part of how I showed up in this life. And if other people feel the same way, that's why we're participating because we feel like it, because we feel moved.

And of course, in this particular circumstance with what is happening in Gaza, so many people are being moved by this, right?

If we can have everything coming from that sense of the heart being moved and wisdom being moved in a certain direction, then we are being more like God. We're being more like God. At least from the perspective of this tradition.

So God is feeling all these emotions and being moved to participate in everything. And there's no sense that it's right or wrong. It's just being moved.

And of course, in this tradition, the heart is all of reality, and not necessarily the ordinary emotional heart, but the heart of wisdom. Wisdom is full of tenderness and mercy and sweetness and devotion and compassion.

So, when we're just feeling those things, we're moved to participate in different ways. When you're just moved, like Ma called this kheyal, right, to just be moved, to let yourself be moved by life. It doesn't have to look like any particular thing. It doesn't have to look like being involved in public life in a certain way.

But I think that when you're around people that are just being moved, it's clear that they're not lacking in compassion because they're not doing it your way. When people are operating out of concept and fear, it's clear that they're not doing something because they're operating out of concept and fear, right?

So it's easy to tell the difference. Or operating out of compulsion, operating out of a constructed—not constructed by them, but constructed by culture, constructed historically, constructed by karma—sense of urgency and compulsion and ego. Like, I'm good because I'm doing this.

We really can't claim anything about ourselves. We're never making ourselves better. We can't claim anything for ourselves either.

We're not the ones doing this. We are aspects of this Self, this alive, aware, reality, and that's what's doing it. That's what's doing all this, and we're aspects of that.

So, if we had that knowledge for reals, then we would say, I'm doing this. But it wouldn't be small "I", it would be big "I".

This alive, aware reality created all of this, all of these experiences of communicating, of participating. So clearly, the desire of this alive, aware reality is to have this experience of participation and communication. Clearly.

And to have this experience of this play of compassion and sweetness and to experience all the emotions and all the stories. And so that means to me that a realized person is going to be participating fully. You just never know what it's going to look like.

In the Bhagavad Gita, this is the teaching. You cannot help but act because you're here. We could say we could not help but participate because we're God.

And yet, if we were more awake, it could look like anything. If someone was more awake and they just spent their lives at home, seemingly not participating, they would still be participating.

Because you can't help but be for other people when you're more awake. You just can't help it.

So whatever you're doing, whether you're out there marching around or doing some kind of work that's obviously on behalf of other people. Or whether you're just wandering around, having little moments with people that are helpful in some way, or whether you're just sitting in your room, whatever you're doing, it's going to be helpful.

This is the lesson of the Bhagavad Gita, right? That everything that a realized person does and says is yagya, is a pouring of self into Self, a pouring out into this Self. That is the flow of when you're more realized.

But there's no reason for it other than that's the nature of this reality. There's no other reason for it. And it is far from a sense of self-referential urgency and self-referential ethics and self-referentiality in general.

It is far from that. It has a celebratory quality. If you want to be of the most possible benefit, you have to become more realized or to become more immersed in presence, more recognizing of that.

Otherwise, a lot of the energy you put out is just you. You sucking up stuff.

So, if you really have a deep desire to be helpful, you have to become more realized. So sadhana is more important.

I've been doing political work since I was in my early teens, and the difference between what it feels like now and what it felt like then is just vast. Vast.

STUDENT 5
I was having a conversation with my sister. She was in this opportunity to have some reorganization and things were kind of chaotic. And I offered the option of being in that groundlessness, and she asked, 'Well, don't you have the confidence of your practice? And how is that not a ground?' And I didn't know how to answer her.

SHAMBHAVI
I think it really is a very mixed affair for most people because many people try to make their practice a stable, fixed thing where they accomplish the same result every time they do practice.

Like always wanting to feel better after you do practice and clinging to things in a more rote way. This will show up when students don't ask questions. Questions don't come up in the course of practice.

Everything gets kind of nailed down, and there's not really a sense of exploratoriness and curiosity and things moving, and a sense of openness and possibility.

It becomes rote and checklist-y, and in that sense, someone could make their practice aground, another zone of comfortable staleness. [laughs]

But when you're practicing in a more alive way, the sense of exploration and possibility and things arising continuously and being addressed and challenges, including boredom, prevent you from making it a new ground out of that.

Then, of course, you get used to the openness of life, and you can even get addicted to that. That can become a ground, too, for some people. But nonetheless, eventually, there is a kind of refuge that isn't a ground in the sense of all the pieces are always fitting together the same way and are predictable.

But it's like the ground of being immersed in something that is so full of intelligence and sweetness that you don't really need anything else, even though it's totally open, too.