Enjoyment, Playfulness, and Memory

SHAMBHAVI
Lord Shiva, or God, or this reality, or 'that', as Ma called it, is creating everything here. All these different experiences. And from the perspective of this entire reality, everything that's created is like– One of two things are the best analogies.

So, in the Trika tradition, this reality is referred to as a city very often. And remember that India, especially when this tradition was being formed, but even today in lots of places, is largely agrarian.

What do you go to the city for? Even more of a contrast between maybe home life and city life than there might be here for people living outside of the city.

But you go to a city to have diverse experiences and meet people. And encounter things that you haven't encountered before. And enjoy everything.

Have any of you ever had the experience of traveling somewhere and you enjoy things that you wouldn't enjoy at home?

I wrote about this on K108. I was laughing with a friend of mine, who, he had just gotten back from a trip somewhere. I was living in Oakland at the time. He was also. And he was complaining about something at the motel or the hotel he was staying at.

I think it was, like, the shower water wasn't hot enough or something. And he was really, really angry about this. [laughs] And I said to him, you know, if we were out somewhere like on the Mongolian steppe camping, we would be very happy and enjoy just pouring a bucket of cold water over our heads, right?

And we both laughed because it would have been novel! We would have been outside of our regular frame of reference, and it would have been novel.

So, we go to a city to experience novel things. Including all the different ways that people are. With their limitations, without their limitations. Any way that human beings are showing up. We have more enjoyment of that as some sort of expression of the diversity of life.

This is what this alive, aware reality is doing. It's creating all these forms that have many, many, many different shapes, and it's enjoying them. As we would enjoy going to a city and meeting many different kinds of people and having different experiences.

The other way that we can see this is as a work of art. Lord Shiva is often called the artist, and sometimes the magician. When we go to see art, we don't complain if the subject matter of the art isn't some idealized form of human life.

As a matter of fact, if we went to a museum and all there were were paintings or works of art that portrayed idealized forms of human life, we would think, wow, how boring.

No, when we go to an art gallery or museum or something like that, if we see death and destruction and mayhem in works of art, or things referred to that are limited, or forms of human pain or animal pain, or whatever, we're contemplating those things.

We're enjoying them on some level as works of art, as self-expressions of the artist, as things that are talking about the nature of life, right?

That is exactly how all of this alive, aware reality is enjoying or contemplating all of the diversity of this life. As the artist surveying, contemplating, and enjoying their creations in all of their diversity.

And this is not abstract or removed from us AT ALL. We just normally don't notice it, or we are too scared to admit it. But we also enjoy the things that are about destruction and bad behavior.

First of all, we go to the movies and we watch, or we don't go anywhere for the movies anymore, but whatever. We watch movies and TV, and we love to watch things that involve limitation and suffering and murder and mayhem and destruction.

We only complain about those things when we think they're real. But it's not even a guilty pleasure, it's just a pleasure. Wow, it was such a great movie, the whole state of California fell off the continental shelf into the water and all the buildings were coming down. Wow, it was so cool. [laughter]

When we're doing that, we're much more like God than when we're pontificating.

STUDENT 1
On the topic of God experiencing us as limited, I've heard other people say something along the lines of God wants us to wake up. Like, we're being given opportunity, or there's this sense of a wanting, a desire. I'm curious what the deal with that is or how that works.

SHAMBHAVI
When we say that this alive, aware reality wants us to wake up, it's not like...it would be a good thing, so I want it. It's not, like, because it's ethical or good, or somehow a better result than some other result.

It's the pleasure of concealing and then revealing. There's a basic pulse between the nature of things being concealed and the nature of things being revealed.

This is how I understand it. The excitement of that, I think, is what it's about. Not about anything, like, this is super important or meaningful or or anything like that. Because this is all being enacted, dramatized, and experienced within that one Self.

There's not actually anything happening. It's a story being told, or being embodied, through these various experiences.

And we should remember when we ask this kind of question that everything here that we experience in our ordinary life is somehow, even if in a very pale or weak way, an echo of something about the nature of this larger Self.

And those of us who have encountered spiritual life in a certain way—and I can certainly say this about myself—for me, it's just the greatest adventure.

There's nothing more exciting than this to me. No other relationship. There's nothing more nuanced.

There's nothing more that pulls as much from me as this, including my role as a student and practitioner and my role as a teacher, all those different roles. They are using everything that I am.

So I'm just saying this because I think what I'm experiencing somehow does relate to what the whole Self is experiencing.

When I was young, I grew up in a kind of circumstance where there wasn't a lot of support for who I actually was. There was a lot of people around who wanted me to be somebody else.

And one of my big complaints was that I wasn't being used. That I wanted to be able to use all my faculties, and I wanted to be able to give everything that I had to give, and I wanted to feel like I was in use. And I didn't.

And it wasn't until I found this path that that part of me was satisfied.

So there's a sense in which you have this—just now bringing it back to this super-cosmic level—you have this alive, aware existence that is just vastly intelligent. Like you cannot imagine how intelligent it is.

Vastly creative beyond anything we could possibly imagine. Vastly full of hijinks and humor and devotion and all kinds of different things going on on, again, to a degree that you can't possibly imagine, even though we can encounter it.

Once we encounter it, it's like, you know [wide-eyed facial expression of awe] it's like that, right? What does that Self want to do with itself?

I have to assume, knowing what I know about reality, that there's just a continuum from the smallest to the biggest, that it wants to express itself fully the way that I do. That it wants to be fully used. That it wants to really explore the limits of its capacities.

And my experience, this process of waking up is what is fulfilling that desire.

STUDENT 2
So often we're looking for a destination, and there's no destination, really. I mean, there is, in terms of God, but just that sort of concealing, revealing is also within the same kind of oncology of breathing or coming and going, calling, response.

I was just wondering whether you could talk about that because sometimes it feels like a destination.

SHAMBHAVI
The word that's missing that kinda explains everything is play or playfulness, as opposed to a destination, right?

When you were talking, I was just thinking about tigers and monkeys in the Chinese astrology system. And, you know, I'm a monkey, and I've always had a lot of tigers in my life, including my Dzogchen teacher who was a huge tiger.

And tigers are hunters. They're trying to capture something and eat it. They have destinations all over the place. They're just destination-oriented creatures.

And monkeys are just, like, running around in circles, creating a mess and playing.

And of course, in the Chinese system, monkeys and tigers are opposite each other and they're antagonists. Basically, the tiger is just like, I'm serious about this, monkey! [laughter]

And the monkey's like, oh, come on, play with me! Pinching the tiger. Really annoying the tiger, right? Because they're not serious.

And I think that we take our spiritual life very seriously in all– our work life, every kind of our life, with these tiger-like attitudes that we're going to come to a destination of some sort, or an achievement.

And of course, titans, the titan realm, they MUST HAVE a final achievement because they must get to the top. They need to know they're the best, at the top. And if there's no final achievement, then they can't do that, right?

The sandhi, it's like a gap between one thing and another. And one of the sandhis that we practice with is the sandhis of the breath. The gap between the in-breath and the out-breath and the out-breath and the in-breath.

And what is in that gap is openness. Open possibility, open potential. Just a sense of open livingness. There's no goal there. There's nothing to do there, particularly, other than relax and see what happens. [chuckles]

When we talk about realization, one of the ways that it's talked about is walking in the sandhi. We're living in the sandhi. That we would always be in that gap, in the in-between, in that place of open, infinite potentiality.

And what would we do there? Well, basically anything we want. There wouldn't be a sense that we had to live one way or another way or achieve one thing or another thing. It's a zone of spontaneity.

So the words that are missing there are words like playfulness and spontaneity and just a sense of self-expression. This revealing and concealing is a game. It's a game!

STUDENT 3
How can a practitioner in our tradition utilize memory to help be awake?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, think about how, again, this is one of the big cosmic principles, that everything exists on a continuum from subtle to gross.

Memories are images or words, and they arise somehow, and they're more subtle in that form. They have energy. They have an energetic quality. That's the next most gross form. And then they affect our bodies. That's the next most gross form.

They go from subtle to thought, or image or something, or fragment of a story, or something. That then they have this energetic quality, and that energetic quality informs our embodiment.

Memories are cascading in that way, just like everything else. And so, for instance if we study view teachings or we write down the words of our teacher, or words of other teachers that have inspired us.

And then we're doing practice and we remember those words, or we open up a notebook and we read them. That has an impact. It reorganizes us. In some way that makes us more available to the process of awakening.

When I started Kindred 108, the very first essay was called something like The Red Book, or Red Books or something. Because I used to keep all my notes that I took in teachings and write down thoughts I had about practice and spiritual life, and things that had really inspired me that I'd read, or from my teachers.

I'd put them all in these notebooks. And then I would reread them. And it was like getting transmission all over again.

That's one use of memory is to remember the teachings. And it's not just about some intellectual process. It's about encountering the energy of the teachings and letting that reembody us in some way, even subtly.

Then, of course, we have the memories that we remember, but then we have the memories that are just part of who we are, but we don't have a conscious memory of those things. They're informing lots of different things.

I mean, you could think of, first of all, genetics, DNA, as a very, very gross form of memory. A very embodied physical form of memory.

But there's this whole reservoir of other memories that are much more subtle, of other lives. Maybe they're even not memories. Who knows where they are in time, but...

And, in our lives, as being practitioners in other forms. In every spiritual community, there are different people with different capacities to do practice and realize, right? Why is that? Why doesn't everyone come in with the same capacity?

Because we all are, like, these different strands, and one way you could think of that is, karma is a kind of memory, and they're informing us.

And it means that someone could start doing mantra in this life, and they've done so many mantras in some other form that they're just, like, boom, right there with the mantra, right?

When I was doing formal practice for so many hours a day, for years on end, I was having many memories of practices that I'd learned elsewhere, not from teachers in this life. They were surfacing as I was doing that, and that really, really helped me. They were very practical things that I was remembering.

There's also this sense of accompaniment. We have all these other lives around us. We're in collectivities, and we have communal, as you said, memory, collective memory. That can be supportive or not, but it gives us a sense of accompaniment.

Linear time is an aspect of our karma, of our human realm experience. And eventually, we want to be more in maha time. But within maha time are all times and places and experiences and all memories.

The whole concept of memory starts to break down because when linear time starts to break down, what happens to memory? What is it?

If we're no longer so attached, hook, line, and sinker to this idea of linear time, and we're having a more full space experience, what are memories? We don't know where they come from.

They're just other lives. They're just forms of life. They're just snatches of narrative, right? Or they're teachings, or they're something. But they're not necessarily memories the way that we normally think of memories as something that happened in the past.