Shambhavi riffs on the destructive nature of spiritual practice, on death and immortality, and on what is revealed when obscurations of the senses are removed. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
first words from the podcast
There really isn’t anything more Tantrik than death. That’s because this practice is destructive and subtractive—not creative and additive. The practice doesn’t create anything. It subtracts obscurations. It deletes. Along the way we have a lot of experiences of things coming to an end.
Often we’re fundamentally trying to maintain everything in some steady state because we’re used to it, not because it’s necessarily good for us or the best choice. Many people just want to maintain things, and they don’t even care how horrible it is. They can be in the worst job where they just feel terrible every day at their job. Or they can be in a relationship where they are really unhappy. Yet people do their darndest to maintain those things out of a sense of fear of the unknown.
This is a very un-useful attitude if you want to Self-realize. You have to be willing to let things drift off, crash and burn, be taken away from you. You have to be willing to let go of all of your ideas about just about everything. And you have to be surprised by the things that you lose, the things that are destroyed, the things that are subtracted during this process. So in this practice we experience many, many kinds of deaths and endings.
