The Meaning of Matrika

SHAMBHAVI
Welcome, everybody, especially those who haven't yet been to our new home, Matrika House. I'm going to talk actually tonight a little bit about matrika, what it means.

It's actually one of the, if not the most central insight it indicates the most central insight of this tradition of the yogis and siddhas in this tradition, which is that there's a direct relationship between sound and the creation.

So the word matrika means little mothers, or the mothers. And if you Google this or look on Wikipedia or something, you'll see something about the seven or the eight forms of Shakti that helped to defeat some demons in Indian mythology.

And in the sense that the matrikas in those stories are forms of creative power, they're forms of shakti. The word shakti means creative power. It is pretty much the same meaning as in the Kashmiri tradition. But in the Kashmiri tradition, there is more importantly the meaning of the matrikas as the creative energies of the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.

And in fact, when we get more settled, I'm envisioning we're going to have some paintings all around the perimeter of the Sanskrit alphabet, because this is Matrika House.

One of the ways in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism or Trika Shaivism, the tantric tradition of North India, one of the ways that we describe reality, the ordinary reality that we experience every day, is as visible sound.

So there's a fundamental vibratory quality to reality. And that vibratory quality relates to sound, language, letters of the alphabet, words, and also all the forms that we experience now. That sound dimension in its vibratory quality is related to shakti, that creative power.

So there's an ocean of consciousness and energy, and it's the energy that is creating all the waves. If there was no energy, the ocean would just be an inert body of water.

So in the tradition, the ocean represents the ocean of consciousness that is our reality. But the waves are produced by this vibratory aspect or this creative power, which is shakti.

So the sound quality is the shakti of God. It's the power of God to create all of these experiences that we're enjoying right now or not enjoying, as the case may be.

What is a letter? A letter is a sound form. And when we think about an alphabet, it has different letters. The Sanskrit alphabet happens to have more letters than the Roman alphabet that we use.

But in any case, it's the same idea. And those are distinct sounds. Whenever we're talking about forms that are distinct, we're talking about duality.

So duality is the experience. It's an experience of there being more than one something.

If we were not having an experience of duality, then we would not be having the experience of being in these separate bodies and sitting in this room. And I'm here and I'm talking and you're listening and I'm looking at you and you're looking at me.

That experience is inherently dualistic, because we're having the experience that there's more than one something here. If we were having a nondual experience, then it would just be some homogeneous experience where there was no differentiation between forms.

So it's said in the tradition that the first forms to be emitted from this undifferentiated ocean of consciousness and energy, just like waves arise in an ocean, are the sound forms of the Sanskrit alphabet.

And these are called the matrikas. They're the little mothers that give birth to everything else.

One thing you have to kind of grok in order for this to make any sense at all to you is that the understanding of language throughout India, not just in my tradition, is quite different than our understanding of language.

So we have an idea that this is a notebook, and we use the word notebook to refer to this.

But if we wanted to call this cow, it wouldn't really make any difference. We don't have the idea that there's any actual relationship between a word and the object that it points toward.

However, in Indian culture and in other cultures where the name of God has been very important, and where language has always been an aspect of talking about creation "In the beginning was the word," right? Same idea.

Then there's a different idea of language. In Hebrew, in Islamic languages, in Sanskrit, the idea of language is that language is intimately connected to what it refers to. It is the sound form of whatever it refers to.

So the matrikas in their primordial emergence from the undifferentiated ocean of consciousness and energy are not just letters. They're not just these dry, representational things that we feel have no life.

They are actually living beings. And in fact, they are considered to be deities. Each of those 50 letter forms, the matrikas, are considered to be deities in and of themselves, forms of the deity, of the goddess Shakti.

And they in turn form mantras like Om and Om Namah Shivaya. Mantras you're familiar with.

And then those mantras in turn become the sound forms of the actual deities, and eventually the sound forms of everything else that we're familiar with from ourselves to the animals, to trees and toasters and teapots and everything else.

So there is an absolute continuum of becoming. Or what I like to say, a cascade of becoming, between our everyday ordinary experience and these sound forms.

Most of what I'm going to read you right now is from the Shiva Sutras. So the Shiva Sutras are one of the main received teaching texts of the Kashmiri Tantric tradition. The Shiva Sutras say that all the letters of the alphabet are the embodiment of God, specifically of Shakti.

Each letter of the alphabet is a specific shakti, or power. These shaktis, taken together, are known as matrika. Each and every matrika is a living energy in itself and should in no way be mistaken for a mere representation of a sound.

A living force is created by placing the letters in a certain systematic order. So Om, that's the first word to appear out from the matrikas, according to the tradition. It's called the pranava mantra, the original mantra. Well actually there are three pranava mantras, but that's the one most people are familiar with.

And we already know, anybody who's chanting Om every now and then knows that it has a lot of power, and then it can change how you feel. And if you really chanted it for a long time, over and over again, it would change a lot of things for you.

So it is actually not just a word that stands for something or has the translation. In fact, it has no translation.

It's more like, in our terms, more like a chemical reagent. It's something that transforms directly, not something that just represents something else in an arbitrary way.

This is directly from the commentary by Swami Lakshmanjoo. Swami Lakshmanjoo was the 20th century teacher of Kashmir Shaivism, and he did a translation and a commentary on the Shiva Sutras.

And he said, this: “Matrika, the universal mother, is the master director, and she creates the limitation that is our experience of duality.”

For those of you that have been around for a while, she creates anavamala, this master director. She creates limitation on the ocean of consciousness and energy so that we can have all of these experiences. That's what matrika does.

When this universal energy of the matrikas is known in a limited way, then we have samsara, we have suffering. When the energy of the matrikas is known in the correct way as being a direct expression of essence nature, of the primordial reality, then we have freedom.

So when we understand the shaktis of these matrikas and what they create, everything that we see and everything that we are. When we understand them in a limited way, then we have suffering.

When we understand them in their true meaning and origin, when we understand what those energies really are and what we really are, then we have freedom, svatantrya.

Then Swami Lakshmanjoo goes on to talk about the three malas. Three malas are three forms of limitation that define duality, define our experience in duality.

And they're all mediated or directed by the matrikas, the sound forms. These creative energies that start from these primordial sounds and eventually cascade and become everything that we are, visible sound.

The first is a feeling of incompletion. That's one limitation that we are all familiar with.

The second is that we only have knowledge of duality. We really believe that we're separate beings.

And the third is that we are driven by impressions of pain and pleasure. We are sort of pushed around by our aversion to pain and our attachment to pleasure.

All three of these limitations are directed by the universal mother, the matrikas. This is part of her creative expression.

Why creative? Well, as I say very often, this bowl is made out of clay. It came from an undifferentiated lump of clay. An undifferentiated lump of clay is... Well, it's sort of interesting, but you can't really do that much with it other than make a bowl or a cup. [laughs]

So if we think of undifferentiated consciousness and energy that way, then we can understand that this bowl in being made a bowl has limitations.

As an undifferentiated lump of clay, it had much more potential. It could be a bowl, it could be a cup, it could be a plate, it could be a figurine, right? It could be any number of things. When it's undifferentiated, all of those forms are in potential in that lump of clay.

But once it becomes a bowl, well, now it's set as a bowl. It has limitations, but now it's also kind of cool. We can enjoy this. Maybe if it were a better bowl, we could even say it was a work of art. [laughter]

The thing is that even though we experience all these limitations here- and the matrikas are the creative energies that kind of carve us out of the ocean of consciousness and energy.

Even though we experience a lot of limitation and feelings of separation and adequacy and loneliness and all those things we experience, we also are works of art.

And when we're more awake, when we do spiritual practice, we become more awake. And we realize our real nature as something has been fashioned with a certain beautiful aesthetic out of consciousness and energy, then we can just enjoy this condition rather than suffering from it.

This is the movement from bondage to freedom.

The discussion of matrika and what matrika means forms a large part of the Shiva Sutras. And so I'm going to be giving more teachings on those later. But for now, I think I'm just going to stop and let you ponder that.

So when we named this Matrika House, we're saying that this is a place where creativity can happen. Where people can learn to enjoy form, and learn to experience form from a place of a feeling of continuity and belonging and being at home rather than a feeling of separation and suffering.

When we become more enlightened, we don't stop having an experience of form. That would be really boring. [laughs]

I, for one, do not want to be floating around in a homogeneous pink cloud. That isn't really my idea of fun.

What is my idea of fun is that I get to enjoy all this without the baggage of the defensiveness and protectiveness and aggression that goes along with thinking that you're separate.

When we feel that we're separate, and we don't understand that we actually are just forms arising from this continuous ocean of consciousness and energy, then we suffer from being separate.

That's really all we suffer from. We suffer from our conviction that separation is our root condition. It isn't our root condition. It's our root ignorance.

Our root condition is continuity. And when we discover that, then we can enjoy the arising of all these forms from a different perspective, from a different place.

So Matrika House, I hope, will be a place where we can enjoy form. Where we can make lots of sound forms and noises [laughs], joyful noises unto the Lord, and discover more creative power, more freedom.

And be able to play in the world without the sense of heaviness that comes when we're clinging to our sense of self. Our small sense of self.

We're going to spend a lot of effort, we already have. We are going to spend a lot more effort beautifying this place. Having beautiful places to practice in is a big part of this tradition. Having places that are kind of wild with color and detail is part of this tradition.

You'll see more and more layers of color and detail being added as time goes by. [It'll] be kind of interesting because on the West Coast, where a lot of us are from, it's not so unusual to have spaces like this.

But here things are a little more muted in terms of color. And it'll be kind of interesting to see what happens when we create a wildly colorful, multilayered place for people to come and enjoy the creation.