Shambhavi gives a dharma talk and leads a community discussion about how we can get back in touch with our essential goodness. Recognizing and remaining aware of our indestructible goodness brings tremendous confidence into our lives. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
First Words from Podcast
One of the main teachings of this tradition is that there’s no sin and there’s no evil. These are related teachings: There’s no sin. There’s no evil. There’s nothing wrong. Everything’s beneficent. There’s only auspiciousness. Everything’s perfect from the beginning.
How many of the people sitting here actually think that they have a real feeling for that? Or is it just words? And how many of you still largely go about your day as if there’s something wrong with you? As if there’s evil in the world, and everything’s flawed, and there’s sin, and all that stuff?
A huge part of the practical part of our practice relates to these teachings. We have these absolute teachings: there’s no evil, there’s no sin, there’s nothing wrong, everything’s fine. Then the practical part of the teaching that we apply in everyday life is to look for the wisdom in every situation. What’s beneficent about all of this? What’s auspicious?
One of the names of Lord Shiva is The Auspicious. Why is it auspicious? Well, I could sit up here and say well, because everything is made of compassion and intelligence and mercy and curiosity and blah blah blah. Some of you have that experience now and then, or some of the time, but not enough of the time to really yank yourselves out of your normal blah way of relating to everything.
However, we also do very often have the experience of wisdom being in different kinds of situations. This is a very common human experience. For instance, we lose a home, our house burns down in a fire let’s say, or we get a disease, or someone breaks up with us and we didn’t want them to, or we lose a job, or something like that. And although we suffer and we don’t like it, seven times out of ten we have enough clarity so that at some point we start to see the wisdom in it. So in that sense we do have quite regular experiences of the auspiciousness of life. Even when we’re in the midst of something that feels terrible, we can look into it and at least eventually find out that it was actually doing us some good.
