Satsang
PODCAST
EPISODE NO.
404

Mandala vs Kula, Loss, and Paranoia

2024-10-16

Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for satsang and get real about all the questions we humans want answered. Intimate, courageous, heartfelt spiritual talk about pretty much everything. So happy you are here! A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi

STUDENT 1
I wanted to hear you talk about the kula and the mandala and the various layers of the community.

SHAMBHAVI
Sure. Great question.

STUDENT 1
And people moving in and out with it. I've been feeling absences pretty strongly.

SHAMBHAVI
We have a small community, and we are unusually tight knit. So when people move in and out of being present, sometimes we feel it more because we don't really have like an outer ring. Everybody's sort of being held very closely in the same space. So we have a little more pain when that happens, right?

Other communities that I've been in, there's just a lot more people sort of there, and maybe coming and going all the time. And we also have that happening, too, to some extent. But in general, we have the same people really relating to each other very closely often.

And then when someone gets into a different phase of life or just decides this isn't for them or decides to pay attention to something else for a while, we feel it. It affects the energy body of the community more than it would if we were more of an amorphous group.

There's a distinction between the word sangha and kula, which I think is really useful. We don't use the word sangha. That's really not used very much, or as far as I know, at all in Hindu communities. Even though it's a Sanskrit word, I think it's mainly used in Buddhist communities. But maybe some yoga studios use it, too.

But mandala is much more of a traditional name in Tantrik communities, both in Tibet and India. And mandala is like a geometric form that has many, many different aspects to it in many layers.

But one of the aspects of a mandala is that it represents a city. So it's like a city with a center and with four gates on the outside. And the mandalas are usually three-dimensional, and the yantras are two-dimensional, but they're similar in that relationship to representing manifest life.

And specifically a city as a living symbol of when we come together in all of the diversity that we come together in. When we talk about mandala at Jaya Kula, we're talking about anyone who's in that city with us.

And as we know, when you're in a city, you know some people very well, and you know other people as acquaintances. The person who sells you your morning coffee, you might have a friendly, warm feeling for and talk to every day, but they're different than the people that you live with. And then there are the people that you just pass by and don't know very well.

So what we call the mandala here is basically anyone, including the people that are very close in, the people that just come around now and then, the people that just listen to podcasts and occasionally ask me a question. But anybody that has some kind of connection with the community that they are maintaining in some way, right?

I joke around because hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, ever a hundred percent leaves Jaya Kula. It's kind of interesting.

When I send out the newsletter, there's many, many, many people that represent different generations of students. People that were just around in passing or people that were close and then left or whoever they were, just lots and lots of people that I've known since 2007.

And in the years, we didn't really form Jaya Kula as a nonprofit organization until 2011. That's when we first had a board. And in 2007, when Jaya Kula started, there was nobody but me.

And I did everything. Before people came over, I cleaned the toilets and made tea and served everybody and then cleaned up after they left. And then sometimes there would be three people at satsang. Sometimes it would be seven. That would be like a lot.

And then slowly things started to grow, and eventually people got the idea that maybe they might lend a hand [laughs]. Yeah.

And then we got together with the students one time. We had a meeting, and the students decided that they would take on running Jaya Kula. And then we formed little groups of different people working on different parts of Jaya Kula.

When I send out a newsletter, it tells me who opened it. And it's like people from way back when just keep opening the newsletter. They still feel some connection that they want to read the newsletter. I'm always astounded at that.

The very, very first people that I met who were students when I went to Portland, Oregon, from San Francisco in the summer of 2007, even some of those people are still kind of hanging around. So that's kind of interesting that that connection, even if it's very, very tenuous, gets maintained.

So all of those people are aspects of the mandala in some way or another, by our definition. They're in the city with us.

And then, of course, there are the people who are on Slack who are people who are actually what I call following the teachings. And that term has mystified people at some point or another, so I'll just say what it is.

It means that you've taken teachings from me. Being on our Slack as a full access member means that you've taken Foundations, that you're doing some of those practices, that you consider that I'm your teacher. That doesn't mean I'm your guru, but just I'm the person whose teachings you're mainly following.

And that's created this enormously stable, in some respects, base for our community that everyone on Slack is doing that, and we have that in common.

So "kula" means family. And traditionally, kula is a word specifically used in the Trika tradition. It was very multivalenced, has many, many meanings. But one of the meanings is someone who is in the family of the guru.

And this was literally because all of the teachers in Trika Shaivism and other direct realization traditions are householders. They're all living outside of ashrams. A lot of them were married and had kids or other kinds of families.

And then they would have some very small number of students, two or three or four or five students, living either in their house or in the vicinity. And these are the people who considered that teacher to be their guru, or that tradition to be the one for them.

That was their commitment. That was their desire, and that was their feeling.

So kula has that meaning of someone with a deeper feeling for this tradition, for me, for the community, who is someone who is basically putting this in the center of their lives and who feels like it's not a question for them whether they're doing this or not.

Traditionally, kula would mean initiated students, but I actually stopped doing formal name initiations recently. So the idea of kula is not that strict anymore.

Then the other thing is that this community has been heavily weighted on the side of young people or younger people. And there's many students who have come to Jaya Kula when they were in their 20s.

Not all of them are still here, but that is, I think, completely to be expected because you're in your 20s and you have a certain an attitude about your life, you're usually a little more daring and a little more willing to try things that are outside of maybe what you were brought up with.

And then you get into your 30s, especially your middle to late 30s, and you want something different. You know, it becomes time to prove yourself in the conventional world.

And so I think that some people, as you say, who aren't as present as they used to be, that's what they're doing. They're people who started being here in their 20s, and now they're just in a different phase of life.

And then there's other people who just get pissed off for some reason and leave or who just decide, 'This isn't for me.' What more can I say about it?

STUDENT 1
I have a question about relating to that feeling of loss. People who I felt really connected with and now are just... I could reach out to them, but it wouldn't be in the same context.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah. Well, life entails loss. I don't know what else to say about that. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, it seems perfectly It also seems perfectly natural and normal to feel that. It also seems perfectly natural and normal for people to come and go.

STUDENT 2
Would you talk more about the amount of loss, the rate of loss? Like loss after loss after loss, day after day after day? I've done really well at coping through my practice for eight months. So just about constant loss and constant stress, and the limits that we might have.

SHAMBHAVI
Now that's a very profound question. Everyone experiences loss. Everyone doesn't experience the same amount of loss, but everybody experiences loss. Whatever we're experiencing in general, we're in the middle somewhere.

I give my students many, many tools over many years, and some significant portion of them don't pick up those tools. [laughs] So, for whatever reason, karmas are just too strong. This is also just normal.

When we want teachings, that's shaktipat. When we search for teachings, that's shaktipat. When we have that desire. When we learn, we have the desire to learn, that's shaktipat. When we use what we've learned for benefit, that's shaktipat.

So there's something that's working through your life that I'm sure is related to past life karmas. On the one hand, you've had a lot of teachings and you've done a lot of practice. On the other hand, you've had a lot of difficult things to deal with. Those two things go hand in hand.

They're both God's grace, both of those things, even though one part of that is very, very difficult.

People have so few obstacles, yet they don't practice. They don't practice because they're uncomfortable on their cushion, or they don't practice because they're upset about what their parents said to them, or they don't practice because whatever reason, sometimes not very big obstacles.

And then someone like you who practices despite enormous obstacles.

One of the things that consist in sadhana does for us is it puts us in touch with the baseline of our personality, the baseline of our lives. If you're doing the kind of practice that I'm doing or people in our community are doing, you start to see yourself as you really are for better or worse.

And there's a nakedness to yourself that develops and honesty that I have also seen in people that have been through a lot of trials and trauma. That can also do the same thing for you.

For instance, when I was in my 20s, I knew quite a number of people who had serious drug addiction problems, and especially the ones that were addicted to things like heroin.

There were some people like that who were the most honest, modest people I'd ever met at that time because they had seen their baseline, and they just couldn't continue to project something else.

They were kind to people. They spoke kindly to people because seeing their own baseline, they also saw other people's.

And I'm not saying every addict is like this. I'm just saying I experienced this with some people, that they just became extremely humble and kind and honest because they'd seen what was underlying everything, and they'd suffered.

So suffering can have that effect. It can wear away pride and wear away pretense and wear away dishonesty. Not to minimize how difficult those things are, but for some of us, they're necessary.

Others of us just get to sit on a cushion for fifty years. We get it easy, but we still complain about it. [laughs]

And I also was thinking today that it's really not possible to do serious work that actually gets somewhere with people who are not honest. It's just not possible.

You know, if we talk about mandala and kula, the number one requirement for actually calling yourself a person who has a guru or who's working at that level. Because when you say someone's your guru, you're not just saying something about the other person.

You're saying something about yourself, too. And when you say you're a disciple of something or someone, that is a very strong statement. And most people who say that have no idea what they're talking about.

And that's because they don't actually understand those relationships, and they don't have the honesty to be in those relationships. This is just something I've learned over the years. I didn't know this.

You know, when I was a younger teacher, I thought dishonesty was It's just a fixation among many, just something we're working on. But as I've gone along, and especially in the last couple of years, I've realized, no, honesty is a prerequisite for doing the full on kind of work.

You just have to start with that if you really want to be on the path full on. There's no other way. So suffering brings us honesty sometimes. I have noticed. It's easy to fool ourselves when we're not in pain.

STUDENT 3
I wanted to ask about paranoia and the conjuring of worst case scenarios with no backing, no evidence to think those thoughts, but they just happen.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, a lot of that's ancestral karma. That can happen when you have ancestors who have been in war zones or experienced other really severe trauma like that. That kind of paranoia can result as... It's called a vritti, V-R-I-T-T-I, vritti.

It's like a mind pattern, not just intellectual mind, but feeling mind. Those things just run in the background, and then they can come out and become on a more conscious level. Like that.

So the best thing to do is, first of all, recognize them. When you have those thoughts, step back a little bit, recognize them as, 'Oh, right, those thoughts like that. I know what those thoughts are. Those are those thoughts I have and those feelings I have about worst case scenarios and those paranoid things.'

And then there's a way that you can internally just gaze into them. So you're having the thoughts and you're just calmly gazing at them, not doing anything about them, not trying to make them go away, not trying to figure them out, not analyzing them.

So the first step is you just recognize, 'Oh, there are those thoughts that I have, those things' in a way that is neutral. Like, okay, yeah, they happen, but not taking them literally at face value or not taking them as if they have any basis in reality.

They are real experiences, but they aren't actually about the real world as you're living it right now. They might have been real and appropriate in someone else's world that is connected to you ancestrally, but it's not your life now.

So you're just recognizing that in a calm, neutral way. And then you're just looking at those thoughts, not analyzing them, just gazing, almost like meditatively, and then they just go away.

Not permanently, though. You just have to keep doing that.

There's some vrittis like that that just last your whole lifetime. But they'll just get weaker and weaker as you relate to them more like that in a sort of neutral way. You know, okay, that's what that is. And I'm just going to gaze at that in a meditative way, and then they just subside.

If you do that over and over again, they lose their grip on you. They may not ever completely go away, but they lose their grip on you. I have that same thing. It doesn't rise to the level of actual paranoia about my life.

But there are this sub-vritti about being unfairly accused by any, like, police kind of figure that I don't know where it comes from. I have no idea. It's not related to my actual current life. I just noticed the thought happening, like a little scenario pops up in my mind.

Like, I'm running a little drama in my mind about being falsely accused. And I've joked about this before because it's even like when I go to big box stores and they have those guards at the entry, like Best Buy or something, this thought always occurs to me, like, 'Okay, look innocent.' [laughs] Like, like, 'okay, I'll just sneak by and hopefully they won't stop me.'

You know, I'm not doing anything wrong. It's just this paranoia about armed authority. This has something to do with some strand of past life that's in this body. I have no idea where it comes from, but I just notice it and acknowledge it, and it's like, okay, that's what that is.

So just take a step back. When you start to notice those things are running, take a step back and just say to yourself, okay, there's that again. There's those thoughts again. Just to have a moment of recognition.

These are patterns, right? And then just you can have your eyes open, but have an inner gaze. You're just gazing at those patterns of thought in a neutral contemplative way, and then just wait for them to subside because all thoughts arise and subside.

I mean, it doesn't matter what it is. It's going to subside. It's going to come again, but it will subside in that moment. And then you can just do it again the next time. And eventually, it takes the wind out of the sails of those kinds of patterns.

So you're basically changing your relationship to them. They may go away entirely or they may not. There's other kinds of work you can do on those thoughts. This is more direct. I'm not particularly disturbed by my thoughts about people with guns who are in positions of authority. It's not like ruining my life in any way to have those thoughts in my mind.

But I do think it's something I would like it to go away because it's a repetitive compulsive thing, and I'm trying to get rid of stuff like that. But if it doesn't go away, what can I do? Really, all I'm doing is changing my relationship to it, even if it doesn't go away.

There's another aspect to the other thought you were saying, though, about people dying or disasters where a lot of people die or you die. Those are rehearsals, in a sense, because we all know everyone actually is going to die.

And somewhere in us, we all know that anyone could die at any moment. That's just a fact. That's not paranoia. And in a sense, we run these outlandish scenarios to rehearse feelings about that to make it more tolerable.

But it's kind of dishonest in a sense, because it's like we're doing it in such a way that we rehearse the feeling, but we're doing it with something— Somewhere in us, we also know it's If you think it's not true. If you think someone hasn't called you or texted you twenty minutes after you texted them, and you're already fantasizing that they're in the hospital or something.

You know somewhere in you—even if you work yourself up into an emotional lather—somewhere in you, you know that it's unlikely that that's the case.

So in a sense, you're just avoiding a sober acknowledgement that actually people can die whenever and you have no control over it.

If you could tolerate that more honestly and get used to that, just the generalized truth that everyone here is going to die at some point, and we don't know when any of us are going to die or how.

If you could just get more comfortable with that, then some of those rehearsals would probably go away, I would bet.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Satsang with Shambhavi is a weekly podcast about spirituality, love, death, devotion and waking up while living in a messy world.