Knowledge is Bondage

STUDENT 1
Could you speak on knowledge as being bondage?

SHAMBHAVI
Sure. So what Scott is referring to is the second shloka of the Shiva Sutras, a text that is or what's called in the Tibetan tradition, a terma, a treasure text. Meaning it's a text that was received rather than planned and written down in an ordinary way.

And it was received by a siddha named Vasgupta sometime way back when, before Abhinavagupta I can't remember exactly when. He had a dream. And in the dream Lord Shiva came to him and said, go to this river and there's a rock there and touch the rock.

And he went there and he touched the rock and the whole text came into his mind all at once. This is sort of convention for shrutis or termas. And he wrote it down from memory, from his mind and from mind stream. And then he spent the rest of his life meditating on this text and teaching it to other people. So it's one of the major scriptures of the Trika tradition.

The first shloka is, everything is consciousness. The second shloka is, jñānam bandaḥ. Knowledge is bondage. And what that means is that any form of limited knowledge that you have, that you're attached to is something you're enslaved to.

It means, in a bigger sense, any concept you have about how things are that you think you know is actually bondage in the sense that your conviction that you know that thing and that it describes something in total is bondage.

The opposite of bondage is being in a state of utter naturalness and spontaneity and letting that wisdom, which is everywhere, just be your guide. And penetrate you and fill you, which it is already. But you have to recognize that without any preconceptions.

So knowledge or something we grasp onto is always limited. It's always something that we have acquired with our ordinary mind. And it's like in the vastness of all knowledge, there's some little picket fence around this little bit we call our knowledge.

And we're very proud of this, very often. We get degrees in our bondage [laughter] and we brag about it. And we are admired for our limited understanding. And we have theories about things, and we very much are attached to what we think about things.

What we think about things is ordinary mind. And although it's very difficult for us in the human realm to imagine this, there is actually another way to use your mind and another way to be in life.

We think that our mind grasping things and knowing things is kind of the ultimate, or the definition of knowledge. But actually, according to the siddhas of this tradition and just the experience of ordinary practitioners such as myself, wisdom, self-knowledge is permeating everything.

It's like a vast body of wisdom that we are embedded in or submerged in or immersed in. And it is self-aware. It is not just facts. It is self-knowledge. It's knowledge of the nature of things. It's knowledge of how things work.

It is also the source of all limitations that we experience. So it's the source of all books. It's the source of all limited ideas about what knowledge is and how to use your mind. It is the source of all that and it is unlimited creativity producing this infinite display or array of forms of life.

So our limited way of approaching things, the fact that we experience this more limited kind of understanding of knowledge which I call command, capture, and control. [laughter] That we use our minds in this form of command, capture, and control.

We want to have command over things, people, and situations. We capture knowledge in order to do that. And then we try to control everything with that knowledge. Command, capture, and control. That's how we use our minds. We think our minds are here and we're just like pulling stuff in, organizing it, and then deploying it in some way.

Well, this alive, aware reality full of wisdom invented that. [laughter] So it's not like in being in bondage and in having this very limited conception of mind, it's not like we are separate from God. We are being God's self-expression when we're doing that.

It's just one of the crazy forms of creativity that's being displayed that we call the human realm. There's no sense in which it's bad or wrong. It is just limited and that's what bondage means. Bondage means limited and having an attachment to that limitation.

We can't detach ourselves from things. We can't decide to be detached. We have to do practice and what we're losing is our identification with certain things.

So if we want to be more specific about what attachment really is, it's like you know something or you have a skill and you're attached to knowing that. You're attached to having that skill. It's part of your identity. It's part of how you make yourself feel good about yourself.

It's part of your brand. It's part of how you announce yourself to other people. It's part of who you think you are. Those are like the basic components of attachment. And that is what we do want to lose.

So for instance, if I'm a potter, I make ceramics. I want to just be making ceramics. I don't want to be a maker of ceramics. I don't want to be someone whose feeling good about themselves depends on my identity as a maker of ceramics. I just want to make ceramics. That's it, there's nothing more to say about it.

So we can still do all the things that we learn or have the regular old knowledge that we have. But what we don't want is to be part of our identity, or our brand, or something necessary to make us feel good about ourselves. Like some compensatory understanding, knowledge, or skill because we don't feel good about ourselves.

Yeah, but I know quantum physics. I hate myself, but I know quantum physics. So I'm really good. [laughter] We don't want it to function like that in our lives. That's where the bondage comes in.

So there's no sense of like, don't know anything in an ordinary way. Forget how to boil an egg. [laughter] It's just, don't be the person who knows how to boil the egg. Just boil the egg. Don't have any charge around knowing how to boil the egg.

It's like doing seva is the same kind of thing. Just do it. That's seva. You just do it. It's not that you're trying to be someone doing it or have anyone else see you in a certain way doing it. Or have it be part of your identity that you do it. It's just you're doing it. That's it.

It's very, very plain. There's no need to announce anything about yourself. And this is something that just falls away more when you do more practice. So you can't really just decide to be a different way. I wish you could. [laughter]

Occasionally it seems that we can. But then it's only because a long chain of other things have happened first, to weaken that attachment. So the first step in those attachments weakening is that you want them to weaken. That you have a feeling of bondage. That you get it, that you're enslaved.

And before that, there's really no hope of dropping anything no matter how much sadhana you're doing, or how many teachings you've had. If you still think, this is who I am, this is very, very important, and everyone should think it's important too. And this is what's good about me.

And all the ways that we just get completely confused with things that we do and think and know. We confuse who we are with all those things. As long as you're still bought into all of that, it's not really going to go away at all.

But the first sign of things loosening is when you start to feel, oh, I'm really enslaved by this and I'd really like to be a different way. And that's really opening the gates to transformation.

I was in academia and I was in the humanities and in a part of the humanities that was very attached to theorizing about things. Writing books about theories of things. I thought this was incredibly exciting and sexy, and I loved being theoretical. [laughter]

Now I just think, what? Now it just seems kind of absurd. Why invent theories out of your ordinary mind when you can go forth and experience how things actually are? Which is much more exciting to me.

So it's not that there's something actually wrong with that limitation or bondage, because it's part of the self-expression of this alive, aware reality. It's just that we have opportunities to experience a fuller sense of the self and of what is wisdom rather than knowledge.

Wisdom is something that speaks to us. It speaks in us. It's perceived directly, and it is perceived with all of your senses all at once, including your mind. So in Trika, the mind is also a sense organ. And although this isn't written in any Trika text, just from my own experience, I like to describe the mind as the sense organ of curiosity.

That it reaches out into things and explores that, rather than drawing everything in command, capture, and control. Every cell in our body has mind. This is an Ayurvedic teaching. Every aspect of us has this possibility of reaching out into and exploring.

And this is what we're doing in our practice, is called opening the gates of the senses. Opening the gates of all of our senses, including our mind, and the mind of every part of us. The mind of our smell, the mind of our sight, the mind of our hearing, the mind of our tasting, the mind of our touching.

This is called tejas, mental fire. And it exists in every cell in our body. And we can have this experience of just total reach out and explore. Lalleshwari described this as a state of continual wonder. And somebody else described it as a state of continual astonishment.

That we reach out and we discover what's here and we're in a state of wonder and astonishment at what's here. Not at what we're making up. [laughter] What-I-think-ism, which is everywhere.

This is an incredibly alive circumstance. Much more alive than just using our minds in this command, capture, and control mode. And everything can be understood this way. Everything can be engaged with in this way. Because everything was invented by this alive, aware reality.

Everything can be understood through this engagement with wisdom, with the open gates of the senses. And this is why Anandamayi Ma, who only by her own report, went to school for about six months of her whole life and was really hardly literate. She could sign her name, sort of.

This is why she could quote scripture from all different kinds of traditions, scripture that she had never read in an ordinary way. This is why she knew how to do rituals of other traditions with absolute precision, even though she had never studied in those traditions in an ordinary way.

This is why she knew all the things that she knew. Because it's basically in the air. All these things have been created by this Self. And so if we were avatars, but we aren't—this isn't something we're aspiring to, being able to pull scriptures out of the air. This is what she could do, being an avatar.

But I'm just saying it is kind of a proof of concept, right? [laughter] It can give us a feeling of confidence knowing that someone can do these things. But it's also why we can have an intuition about a circumstance that's direct and it can turn out to be correct.

It's also why when we do a lot of practice, we can understand the nature of ritual without studying it. So for instance, I was taught to do puja by a pujari, and we learned about the iconography of puja and all that stuff. But there's a lot more to it that wasn't taught.

That because my senses are open and my mind is open enough, I just know. Like it has just come to me to understand, what is the meaning of these aspects of puja. So this is the same process.

So even us, in our much more limited condition have these experiences of direct knowing through the senses, through the wisdom of the Self. In our everyday life, we just have a feeling of knowing something, knowing what is best or not best for us. Or knowing what's up with somebody or some circumstance.

All of these are very common experiences except that we are so attached to rationalistic, command, capture, and control ordinary mind-thinkism that we discount our own wisdom. That is the bondage, right?

Jñānam bandaḥ. We know and yet we go, okay, that's just my experience. That's just a feeling. When it's actually wisdom. So we have been systematically trained since the Enlightenment out of relating to wisdom in a direct way. We have to unlearn that.

And it's very, very difficult for some people. I would say for a lot of people it's very difficult to regain that connection with our own direct knowing, and our own relationship to that living wisdom. Not only to gain a connection with it, but to actually value it and follow it and have confidence in it.

Because then we start to have this doubt. But my mind is telling me something else. But this is just too dangerous to just follow this because it doesn't add up rationally. What about this, and what about the other?

And what about what I think about something? Aren't I just giving myself over? Aren't I now in danger because I'm not following my own independent mind? As if such a thing existed.

So these are all expressions of our bondage, all of these ways of being. They are very historically time limited. The degree of attachment in Western culture especially, but now globally mostly.

Our level of attachment to what ordinary mind is thinking in a conventional way. And figuring things out with ordinary mind from this position of individualism, that is just like at its zenith it seems right now.

But it wasn't always true historically or in other cultures that this is the way that people relate to everything. It's not natural. It's something that is learned culturally.

So one of my jobs and one of the hardest jobs that I have as a teacher is to try to convince everybody that it's okay to follow your own wisdom. That it's not dangerous.

Once you are in contact with wisdom, you understand that you're the daughter and the son of that and you're not separate from it. And whatever sense of knowing you have is that sense of knowing. This is why you can have confidence in it.

Because it's not just some psychological feeling. That's the other giant bill of goods we've been sold. [laughter] But I won't go there right now because you've all heard that rant too many times. That wisdom that we feel and that we can especially contact in the heart space is the voice of that wisdom, big wisdom.

It's not just our individual wisdom. And it's also not just some touchy-feely thing. The reason why we're afraid to follow that wisdom, whether in ourselves or in a teacher or in some other circumstance, is because we have to walk away from our attachments in order to follow it.

And that is scary. We have to walk away from our more familiar ways of being and the things we think are going to fix things and make us feel safe. And we have to follow this thing, whether it's in ourselves or embodied in somebody else, that is radically different from what we've been told is a safe way to operate in the world.

When I was around 35 or something like that, I had been doing these practices daily that I'd learned. Literally one day I realized, oh, this is how I'm navigating my life now. Every minute of every day I'm now navigating using these practices that I learned.

And it was a big shock to me. I was in academia at the time. I was a graduate student, so you can imagine. And it was the first time in my life, even though I'd been doing practices, it was the first time I consciously thought, I have a spiritual life.

And that I was using the sensitivities that I developed through the practice to guide me and navigate me every day. And that I was operating in this completely different way than I had before.

And it was really a surprise to me. It just kind of snuck up on me. And it's completely fine. It's better than fine. It's so much better than how most of us navigate our lives.

You always have to make a leap in following. We all have some area of our lives where we're more in bondage than in other parts of our lives. That's just the nature of human life. We all have a unique incarnation. We all come in with a totally unique dimension.

The other thing that happens is when we're practicing, we're not necessarily so happy-go-lucky about everything. We start to notice more and more feelings of bondage where we thought there was freedom.

I'm sure that through your years of practice that you now notice more of the bondage that you're subject to than you did before. You thought everything was fine in this particular area, but now you're like, oh my God, what is going on here? [laughs]

So that's just part of the practice. We have become more sensitized. Things come to the surface more, and sometimes it doesn't look pretty.

STUDENT 2
I have a question. When you were talking about following wisdom, I'm just wondering if you can speak to anything about relaxing in the anguish of not knowing.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, when I was feeling that kind of thing, I was really helped by something that one of my teachers said that I've repeated sometimes.

He said, mistaking, mistaking, I follow the unmistaken path—Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche. We're going to make mistakes. We're not going to follow perfectly. But somehow stumbling along, we go eventually in the right direction.

And this alive, aware reality has infinite mercy. As long as you follow with a sincere heart, as long as you do your best. Then you're going to find that your mistakes don't have the worst repercussions that you fear.

The thing is, if it's a question of you have clear direction, but you are throwing up confusion and cloudiness and anguish in order not to have to listen to it, then you can just determine very, very strongly that you're going to follow something.

You're going to follow the teacher, you're going to follow the divination, you're going to follow accommodation, you're going to follow something. So in a sense, even though there might still be some anguish there, it doesn't loom as large as when I'm still entertaining the idea of not following the clear direction that I've been given.

And if you don't have a clear direction, there's something in your vision that's clouded, it's just an area of too much impaction, then you just need to consult. But understand that in a sense, it doesn't matter as long as you follow wholeheartedly.

It doesn't matter if it's not the perfect choice. Even if, for instance, people who have really awful teachers and they follow them with open-heartedness and sincerity, that has its rewards. It's your devotion to wisdom that counts, not the specific outcome or what you were following.

So it's really that inner determination in the midst of all of the anguish and confusion and whatever else is happening, that helps to tone that down a bit and keep you on the right path. Even if there are comings and goings. There's not always smoothness.

And when we hit these patches where our karma is more impacted, it does feel more rough. And that's just part of it. So it's kind of like almost still feeling that roughness but also setting it aside at the same time, and determining you're going to follow something.

If you have some idea of the reward, then you're already not in the right zone. You don't really know what the result is going to be until you make the move. You need to find what you're following and do that. And you only learn what the rewards are until things unfold.