Memory, Listening to the Teacher, and Mantra Wisdom Bombs

STUDENT 1
Would you talk about memory and how it relates to practice?

SHAMBHAVI
I can think of a few different ways.

One is that in this kind of tradition, both Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen (both direct realization traditions), there's a certain class of teachings called View teachings.

And View teachings are considered to be the most important thing that you receive from your teacher. The teachings are a form of transmission, and they tell us how to orient ourselves to practice.

One of the things they say in Dzogchen is we receive the View, we practice the View, and then we embody the View. So the View is carrying us along. Not till the very end, though. [laughs]

Because View is an aspect of practice. Eventually we don't need it because we're just immersed in that. But until then, lifetimes possibly from now, when we hear the View and when we remember the View, we don't forget it.

We study it, we contemplate it, and we recall it in our practice. When we feel we are kind of going off on a tangent, it can greatly help our practice.

And most people, when they come to teachings and they hear View teachings—View tells us about cosmology, how things come to be, about death, and how things stop being, and what happens after death.

They tell us why we're practicing, and the bigger context for our practice. This is also a hallmark of this kind of tradition. Many other kinds of traditions, you come, you meet a teacher or community, and you're given a practice to do. And no one really tells you much about it except how to do it.

They don't really tell you sort of where it's situated in the larger context of that tradition.

But in the direct realization traditions, it's considered to be very important to understand the larger context in order to get the best result. So, that's one way in which memory is important.

And for some people, you come and you hear the View, and that's really what resonates—something in you recognizes that. You recognize that something about your existence is being spoken about that feels right to you.

And that's often what makes people keep coming back. Hearing View teachings. That's not the only thing, but it's often the case.

And then there's a teaching that's sort of from Hinduism at large. It's not really from Trika, but—that there's several different kinds of students.

You know, one student is like a pot with holes in it. The teachings get poured in and they just spill out the other end.

The second kind is the pot is turned upside down—which is basically like the student isn't listening, or holds onto a sort of attitude of skepticism, or has some sort of density that the teachings can't even get in.

And the other is the pot is upright, and the teachings can go in and be held.

So what we want to do is try to hold the View by remembering it. And sometimes that requires study. Or maybe not hard study, but at least reviewing and reflecting.

Most of you who have been around for a while know that when I was at your stage of being a sadhaka student I kept voluminous notebooks of things. And I would just go back and read those notebooks.

Those notebooks had teachings in them. They had things that I read in books that I just wrote down from other teachers that inspired me. They had my own reflections on my own practice sort of all mushed together in these books, and I would read them over and over again for inspiration.

And some of the View teachings that I give you guys are View teachings that I received from my teachers, and wrote down in those books, and studied and practiced with.

Even when we're doing, for instance—if we're doing open eyed meditation, remembering even a line of view can help bring us back to the correct orientation. So in that sense, memory is important.

The other kind of memory is a little more esoteric. [laughs] And that's the kind of memory that, first of all, is reflected in the fact that we do respond to the teachings at all.

We have a kind of primordial memory of who we really are and what's really going on here. And when that kind of memory is there, then we can respond to the teachings in a more direct way.

You know, there's some people who are not interested in this kind of thing at all, or who very actively reject any kind of spirituality or practice or anything that is not WYSIWYG. What You See Is What You Get World. And all that means is that there's some kind of memory that isn't available to them.

But anybody that's coming to this kind of tradition or doing any kind of practice has some sort of memory available to them of who they really are. Knowledge, in this sense, memory is knowledge of what your real nature is.

You have to hear the teachings and already know. Like, as I always have said, you can be swirling with doubt—but you have to have one little pearl of confidence in order to even go forward.

Otherwise you just wouldn't. So I like to use that. Gosh, I've probably been saying this for 20 years, but you have to know what you're looking for in order to have that yearning to seek it.

You have to already know what it is that you're looking for.

And that already knowing is a kind of memory, or inner certainty about your real nature.

Or at least a certainty like I had when I was a little kid. That what I was seeing in an ordinary sense was not all there was. I was absolutely certain about that.

Even though I didn't know what it was that I was so desperately seeking, I was certain it was there. So there has to be some little grain of certainty.

You could call it memory, you could call it knowledge, but it's what drives us. It's what causes us to respond when we encounter teachings.

STUDENT 1
Can you talk about learning to listen to the teacher?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, in a sense, it's a natural capacity that just needs to develop and be uncovered over time. When I say listening to the teacher, I don't mean blind obedience. I don't mean some sort of performance of following.

I mean that improvisational listening where you're really listening to somebody else, and you're feeling all the subtleties of communication. And you understand what the relationship is actually for, and you're responding to that.

That's what following actually is.

Following is not slavish obedience, or slavish agreement, or trying to like win the approval of the teacher by doing whatever it is they ask you to do. Any teacher who is really listening to the students doesn't ask people to do anything that they don't actually want to do on some level.

If I ask somebody to do something, it might be like I'm sort of feeling out where they're at. And if I feel that they just don't want to do this thing, I back off immediately. It's like that inner knowing. There has to be prior agreement. There has to be permission.

And part of the subtlety of listening is that permission. And then the student has to be subtly listening to the words of the teacher, feeling the attitude of the teacher, reading the silences of the teacher.

There's all kinds of forms of communication when the student-teacher relationship is sort of operating in its full glory. But even a little bit of that is helpful.

If you have a lot of conditioning, a lot of anxiety, certain very entrenched habits of thought and feeling, what happens is you're not listening to anybody really. Or you're not listening well to anybody.

For instance, a very ordinary example of this—very, very ordinary, is I'm talking or someone's talking. And you look like you're listening, but you're actually formulating an answer in your mind while you're listening. [laughs]

And sometimes people do this externally, too. They go—uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. They're just like, waiting for you to finish.

That's like the most gross form of this. But there are other much more subtle forms of this.

When people have an anxiety and they're trying to address that anxiety and they are not listening and they're not present for what's happening, that can really block communication between teachers and students.

So the first thing that needs to happen is conditioning needs to subside a bit. And everybody comes in in a different condition.

As I have told you, I think one of the great miracles to me, from my perspective of my life, is that I knew how to work with teachers. And just came in knowing how to work with teachers and loving working with teachers.

And I'm incredibly grateful for that.

I don't know how that happened, but it's been one of the great contemplations of my life—like contemplating my relationships with my teachers and my students.

As a teacher, it's a very multilayered, nuanced, orchestral kind of relationship.

And some of you also have been in circumstances where you know that I've waited years to be able to tell you something, or do something with you—like waiting for that right time.

So a big part of the relationship is also timing. Because the job of the teacher is to do things that work. [laughs] That actually help the student, not to just be pushing a program on somebody.

And definitely, I've gotten better at that as I've gone along.

But the thing that's so fascinating about—to me anyway, I'm just speaking for myself—that has just been, you know, a lifelong preoccupation for me, is how incredibly subtle the relationship can be.

And it's like, absolutely engaging. It's like the most refined piece of music, or the most refined bottle of wine, or the most refined something.

It's incredibly refined and multi-layered—and fun! It's just fun to play that way.

Everybody comes in in a different condition, and you all have different capacities for doing this.

And I don't expect everybody to be doing it the same way. And I want everybody to be themselves.

Somebody who was in the community for a while, but not really practicing all that much, but just being a fun person to have around—they got mad at me at what they perceived to be the faux devotion of students.

Like, students were just performing. And then that person called me recently and we had a fun conversation. They had sort of seen some things and changed their mind.

And I said, you know, when people do that to me, I am cringing inside. [laughs]

And she said, I didn't realize that. I said, yeah, I'm trying to not interrupt people's thing too much, especially in the beginning. But really, I only want everyone to be themselves.

And if you feel real devotion, that's great. But if it's just a performance, or largely a performance, I am cringing inside. Just letting you know. [laughs]

I don't want that from anybody.

I want everybody to be able to have the possibility to have the realization that I've had, to whatever extent you can.

And that involves 100% honesty. That's what it involves. And 100% just being willing to be wherever you are.

Even if it's like, looks really messy and not great from your perspective. From my perspective, honesty and just being in your own seat, doing your own thing in your own way, is where it all begins.

That's what we've got. You can't realize from a position of fakeness.

It just doesn't work. Of course, you can't just stop being fake, or contrived is a better word for that.

You can't just stop being contrived just because it sounds like a good thing.

The answer to how to have a more natural relationship with the teacher is to do sadhana and slowly wear away these contrivances. It takes time.

Some things might go away faster or slower, but it takes time. And that's one thing that we don't really have a sense of a lot of the times in our culture today. How long things take.

We don't really have a sense of the vast apprenticeship that waking up really is.

Then the other kind of memory I didn't mention is memory of other lives. Speaking of vastness, and how long it takes.

When you get to a certain point, and I'm not saying any of you are going to get to this point, because, again, everybody is completely unique, right?

But when you get to a certain point, you do start having memories of other lives. And some of them are useful, and some of them are utterly ridiculous and not useful at all.

Random, random stuff. But one of the benefits of having those kind of memories is that you do realize how long this process is, how vast it is. And that's kind of relaxing.

You don't have to do it all now. [laughs]

You can't do it all now. But some of us are trying. And then, of course, some traditions, they're urging you on with this sense of doom. You must do it now because some doom thing is going to happen.

But actually it's all very, very long. Eternal, as a matter of fact. [laughs]

The thing is just try to be as honest as possible, even if you think it's not what the teacher wants. But it always is what the teacher wants. This teacher, anyway.

And, just give the process time to work.

STUDENT 2
So my question is broadly about mantra or japa.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, mantras are little wisdom bombs.

And in this tradition, all mantras are coming from Devi—from Ma Parashakti. And they are all coming out of the heart space.

And so when we do mantra, we're traveling back to the source of those mantras and discovering primordial wisdom.

Maybe not right away. [laughs]

First we encounter the gross vibration of the mantra. But then as we continue to practice over the YEARS—I'm saying this this way because sometimes people will come to me and say, I've been practicing this for three months and I haven't noticed...

I'm like, three months! [laughs]

Devi, in this tradition, specifically para, is that primordial vibration—also sometimes called spanda, which is the essence of sound.

And she is speaking the world and all worlds into existence. And everything here—it's one of my favorite things ever from this tradition—everything here is said to be visible sound.

We are having a more condensed sound-like experience. And when we do japa, we're pouring something more subtle into our more condensed sound form.

And so we're getting more subtle as we're doing it. And eventually we're so subtle that we can perceive wisdom.

But mantra is also great because it's so easy. Unless you hate doing mantra—some people do.

But, if you've got any attunement to that kind of practice, it's so easy. You just sit there and mumble some words out loud. And anybody can do it.

So it's always sort of the first practice that anybody gets. Because really anybody can do that. And eventually it just gets subtler and subtler.

So it's like you're being leavened. Dense sound is being leavened with more subtle sound.

But all sounds are said to come out of the heart space, anahata chakra. Which isn't quite the heart space. But anahata chakra—the unstruck sound. The sound that's always sounding.

That is the essence of all manifest life.

And if you want to discover that, you have to do a lot of practice.