Players, Playfulness, and Pain

STUDENT 1
Can you talk a little bit about being played?

SHAMBHAVI
So being played. This is something that Abhinavagupta wrote about where he said that we do practice so that we can become the player rather than the played.

If we are being the played, that means we are acting a part but we have lost awareness that we're acting a part. Another way of saying that would be that we have limited understanding of our real condition.

So what brings about that situation is lack of a bigger view and reliance on what you think you know of your assumptions about things. And a lack of awareness that your assumptions about things or what you think you know are limited.

This is something that affects us in every single area of our lives [laughs]. From the most minute to the most banal to the most fundamental.

We have very fixed ideas about things and we're convinced of those ways of interpreting those concepts about reality are correct but they are based on very limited understanding.

We have a concept about who we are. We have a concept, for instance, that we are in a separate body, a body that is separate from all other bodies. And that there's some kind of unbreachable boundary between ourselves and others and objects.

This is basic dualistic vision. This is an embodied experience where we are being, in a sense, possessed by that idea or played by that idea that we come in with this sense of separation that is born of the limitations of the kanchukas.

It's just part of the artistry of God that we have these limitations. Just like a character in a movie or a play is fashioned by the writer and the director and the actor to have certain limitations that are being played on the set of that movie or that play or that TV show, whatever it happens to be.

Many of our artistic productions are based on some problem or limitation that's being worked out. Some dogmatisms that are happening, some situations that arise and that people respond to them in very characteristic ways that are shaped by limitations.

In fact, we love seeing artistic productions like that of someone with a problem, working through their problem, right? But even the tools they have to work through it are very, very limited.

When we're being the played, we're like those actors who have been fashioned by this alive, aware reality, and who are ignorant of our condition as actors.

Of course, the example that I've been using for many years is that if we were characters in the soap opera, and we forgot that we were actors getting paid a lot of money to do that but we actually then started to think that we were those characters.

And we'd been divorced twenty seven times and had fourteen abortions and whatever else is wrong, some deadly disease. Whatever else goes on in this thing.

If we think we're just playing those characters, we're getting paid a lot of money, we're having fun, the whole thing is quite ridiculous.

But if we forget that we're playing those parts as actors and we actually think we are those people, then it becomes very tragic and heavy and suffer-y and causes us a great deal of pain.

That's what suffering is about. Suffering is when we're being played and we don't recognize our real condition. We don't recognize that we have continuity with others, with all beings and all things.

We don't recognize that we're made of wisdom, we think we're made of problems [laughs]. We think that everything is happening exactly the way our cultures tell us that they're happening, when in fact they're not happening then.

Because our cultures and our science are very limited in their epistemology and how they say knowledge is and how knowledge is generated. They're very, very limited.

So that causes suffering. That is the origin of suffering being played rather than the player.

As we get more contact with how things actually are, we have more contact with primordial wisdom. We begin to become familiar with that. We begin to become accustomed to feeling less separate.

Our level of suffering starts to subside and our sense of playfulness and ability to kind of roll with the punches increases. Our range of expressiveness increases. Our ability to react in spontaneous playful ways that are not preconditioned by habit pattern, that slowly increases.

Seeing and experiencing our lives as a creative circumstance rather than something we're locked into also starts to come out feeling that there's a way to be creative in life just with our everyday lives and other people and who we are.

Rather than feeling like we have to spend our lives trying to nail down who we are. We spend a lot of time trying to self define and nail down this description of ourselves in order to feel safe.

But then of course, we also feel suffocated by those descriptions and narratives.

STUDENT 2
Friday night my cat didn't come home and the next morning I was devastated. I was bawling. I feel like I was being played and I just decided to go back to reality where people lose their cats and let me go on. Is that sort of what you're talking about?

Well, that's certainly an aspect of the fruit of practice that we would recognize that larger view in the midst of our pain.

It makes the pain just an experience or just a feeling rather than something that is possessing us totally. So we're not saying don't feel pain when we lose a companion. That's just natural, you should just feel whatever you feel.

But then to be able to step into a bigger perspective even in the midst of that is the fruit of practice. Anything that comes, goes.

That's the law of the land in samsara. Anything that comes, goes. There's nothing here, including the whole planet, the whole solar system, the whole galaxy, probably the whole universe. That's not gonna go at some point.

And within that whole scheme. Animals and human beings are just incredibly ephemeral. We're going to go a lot sooner than the whole planet. Our lifespans are very, very short.

STUDENT 3
Can you talk about responding to physical pain?

SHAMBHAVI
There's pains we can palliate with something, hopefully not opiates or anything like that. But, you know, with herbs.

Then there are pains that we can't do anything about or they're pains that are very ephemeral, like we stub our toe.

Or think of it as an experiment, not as something that's better than something else. More often than not, people approach their practice as this thing they're trying to achieve. It's much, much better to approach it as an experiment.

Something that you're playing with and in a relationship with. So when we have physical pain, we are not trying to make it go away and prove ourselves to be great yogis. Just have to say that, right, before I say the next thing.

But it is fun to play with having a much bigger field of perceptual reference while pain is going on. So one of the things I used to play with, like if I stubbed my toe or had a pain in my teeth or something like that.

Just like thinking of Ma, and pushing my awareness out to bring perception of the room, and the city, and maybe the cosmos, or the perception of the natural state of natural awareness, into my experience along with the pain.

Not trying to blot the pain out. Having more of like a question what will happen if I do this? Rather than a goal. Though I used to play with that, and it is kind of interesting how the pain just becomes something in a landscape of perceptions. And it's not so all encompassing when you do that.

The other thing that I think happens and you can try this as experimenting, but at some point it's going to become more intellectual than actual, which is that our concern for others becomes much more than our concern for self.

And our desire to just be of benefit to others becomes much more prominent in our minute to minute experience. And when that happens, then those pains are still happening, they're not taking up as much of our awareness.

Because our awareness is going out, rather than like into our toe. Generally when we have a pain, especially if it's unexpected or very intense for some period of time, all of our awareness kind of goes into that part.

And so what happens is our focus is very narrow. Anything we can do to widen our focus is going to help.

What I'm saying is just something I experimented with, but I'm sure these are the same genre of techniques that people with chronic pain get from their physical therapists and stuff.

But we can have that spiritual component too, where there's a feeling of relating to something in a devotional way more than just a mechanical way. It's a little more magnetizing for me anyway.

STUDENT 4
What do you say about mental things, like embarrassment?

SHAMBHAVI
That's a great point. Yeah, because things like embarrassment, shyness, shame, they all kind of in the same genre. Guilt. They're very complex responses and they have no positive result. So they have no furthering result. They have no expanding result.

Their result is always contractive. So, yeah, forcing your awareness outward in those circumstances is great. I never thought of that, but that's a great point.

STUDENT 5
What do you mean they're complex?

Well, guilt, and shame, and shyness, embarrassment, humiliation, all of these things are secondary responses to something else. There's something more primary than those.

Ideally, we would identify and be able to rest in what is more primary and befriend that thing. It's also, I think, would be a great thing to experiment with, pulling your awareness outward more. Just even physically to a bigger landscape of perception. I'd be curious if you try that, how that went for you.

STUDENT 4
I have tried that over the last six months. Sometimes it's just going out on a hike or something when I'm experiencing that. But there is refuge and expansiveness.

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah, that's great. I mean, when I've done that with physical pain, the pain is still happening again. The goal was not to obliterate the pain. But it is now happening in a much bigger landscape, so it carries much less weight. Just a thing happening.

STUDENT 6
I was wondering if you could explain what the elemental beings are.

SHAMBHAVI
The bhutas, yeah. They're just beings that are living on an elemental level and helping to support the digestive cycle of everything.

So digesting the waste products of other beings, keeping everything circulating. They have some kind of magical quality, but they're very much of the Earth and doing things that keep this realm of earth running. Basic functions of digestion.

STUDENT 7
Are they like the devas you've taught about that are kind of like a slice of reality, like a certain kind of aspect?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, the Mahadevas are personifications of all of reality, of all wisdom. Like Shiva and Durga and Kali and Ganesha, Saraswati.

There are minor devas also, and middling and minor, almost maha, I don't know, but have some more specific characteristics. They're not personifications of everything. They have, like, specific things they might be able to demonstrate for us.

The deities of this tradition are related to as tutors, basically personifying wisdom for us so that it's externalized and we can experience that and contemplate it and embody it more.

Every single speck of space is filled with beings, wall to wall beings. [laughs]

In Buddhist traditions, they call it the Buddha field. There's many, many different ways to experience the continuity of wisdom here. There's formal ways of experiencing it and formless ways of experiencing it.

So we, for instance, might just enter into an experience of what in Dzogchen is called clear light, which is basically an experience of living awareness that doesn't have a form. It has a luminosity.

Or we could experience it as filled with beings, filled with buddhas, filled with devas, filled with all kinds of beings. Nonstop. Or we could experience it as one continuous being.

So there's many ways, none of them is like right or wrong, it's just different ways that as human beings we are given by this alive aware reality to experience the nature of itself.

STUDENT 8
Can you talk about the communication of color?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, our experience of form and color in our everyday life relates to the function of fire element. The fire element is related to vision.

And so one aspect is how healthy is the manifestation of fire element in us? How balanced is it? How unblocked is it?

It can get blocked by water elements like dampness on a campfire, so kind of cloudy vision. It can get scattered by wind, or over inflamed by wind.

So really working with Ayurveda to balance the doshas is the best way to have more visual acuity and a more alive perception. I don't want to say intense because vision can be overly intense also when pitta is exacerbated.

So, we want it to feel alive but not like assaultive.

So that's really the best way to go if you want to have that. Both our ability to visualize internally, mental fire tejas, which is living in every cell of the body. And it brings about not just visual clarity but clarity into all of the senses.

One of the things I think that happens is because we look at computer screens so much or we look at screens filled with light and very saturated intense color it's doing something to our tejas.

Sort of attenuating it and making it more difficult for us to visualize internally.

There's certain like medications you can take that sort of—I can't think of an example right now but there's many of them—where they kind of supersede your body's natural ability to produce those substances.

Like you take replacement substances because you're having trouble producing something but then it makes it even harder for you to produce.

And then if you stop taking that thing then you just crash. So I think it's the same with our engagement with screens that our tejas is kind of crashing.

And that's why I would say at least seventy percent if not more of my students have a really difficult time visualizing or can't visualize at all internally.

STUDENT 9
I was thinking about how we ascribe meaning the color that's very culturally reflected and then in our tradition we have colors that represent the way reality is.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, colors are an energetic state. So we're not assigning meaning to them.

If we say for instance, that a particular kind of blue is a living symbol of dharmakaya or of the unconditioned, it's not a symbolic meaning being assigned to it. It means that if you look at this color and you visualize this color, you might have an experience of more unconditioned awareness.

So it's kind of like mantra. Mantra may or may not have a literal meaning. But the actual, more profound activity of mantra is more direct and more like a catalyst or a chemical of some sort. It's actually doing something to you.

When we contemplate a golden warm yellow that's related to Earth element, we're having an experience. It's not just like, oh, yellow means Earth element mind.

STUDENT 10
I was doing bhuta shuddhi and I was just kind of wondering to myself, like, how do my body energy and mind know what these symbols mean? Would it still work if you hadn't taught us what they meant?

SHAMBHAVI
Change that question a little bit. Is what this tradition and Shambhavi say actually what's happening to me? So investigate your own experience and see if it comports with the teaching.

That's a great kind of question to ask. If we don't ask those kinds of questions, then we might just say at the level of concept. I'm doing this thing. Visualizing these colors.

This means we remain very surface-y. If we're really dogmatically attached or 'Titan-ly' attached to having spiritual accomplishment of a certain sort, we're going to like, 'I am having this experience' even though we're actually not. We're just kind of generating some kind of tense feeling.

But if we say, let me see what I'm experiencing, let me engage and question what is happening and feel what is happening with an open, exploratory, curious way, then we can actually have an authentic relationship with our practice.

STUDENT 11
I have a question about the Mahamrityunjaya. I don't get the cucumber thing. Like, how is that liberation?

SHAMBHAVI
The line where it says, let me be snapped like a ripe cucumber from the vine. Our attachment to the vine is our attachment. So we want to be separated from our attachments, but as a ripe cucumber rather than a dried up something or other.

In other words, let me find self realization when I'm still juicy, when it's ripe, when I can enjoy it. Basically, don't let me wait too long. Don't let me die on the vine before you liberate me.

Well, it also relates to ayurveda where we don't want to die of exhaustion. We want to die with enough energy so that we can have a good death, so that we have energy to go through the bardos, so that we can be more aware as we're dying.

If we die of exhaustion, just kind of like we poop out at the end, and then just get blown around in the Bardos [laughs].

But if we have some energy left to die well with, it's the same principle as going to bed before we're totally exhausted, so that we have enough energy for our organs to regenerate and to dream well.

This idea that we always need some energy, we want to conserve our energy, conserve our ojas. Juice is basically ojas.

Ripeness also refers to spiritual readiness. We say that someone is ripe, meaning that they're somehow about to experience some deeper realization or they're ready to experience it.

The cucumber has a more saumya, sweet, juicy, moonlight quality. It doesn't say pluck me from the vine when I'm a ripe chili [laughs].

STUDENT 12
I've been thinking about temptation, when it comes to eating foods or even doing things, or thinking things.

SHAMBHAVI
Everything has to do with desire. If we think about the patterns that we embody, whether it's like to eat something or to say something or to behave in a certain way, if we, like, draw our awareness into that, we can feel this engine of compulsion running.

We can feel that we're being pulled forward by this kind of momentum. So we could think of karma as compulsion. That's what temptation is. It's the pull of our karmas, which is exacerbated or increased over time as we repeat certain things.

When we discover that there might be a more pleasurable way of living than following all of these compulsions, we have a problem. Because there is literal shakti in these patterns.

That's where the compulsion comes from. It's like a force. It's not a metaphor.

Anybody who has tried to not do something that they want to do knows that it's not a metaphor [laughs].

So we actually have to apply momentum in a different direction in order to interrupt those lesser temptations, so that we can build the temptation to do something in a different way.

It's also why, when we talk about the many eons of stages of life, where we're doing formal sadhana, why the doing of sadhana, is called forming a samskara.

Because we're using the same principle as our karmas are built on, this principle of the momentum of shakti, the momentum of desire, the habituation to a certain direction.

We're using that same principle to make our sadhana effective. That principle that we can build momentum, that we can make shakti, move in a certain direction through repetition.

So we basically have to get tempted to God, right?

In order to do this, we have to become addicted to God or we have to become addicted to something about spiritual life. Whether it's our teachers or the practices or whatever it is.

If we should, in a particular lifetime, be so lucky as to meet a tradition that's really ripe for us, that we're ripe for—speaking of ripeness—we will feel that pull from the heart.

There'll be something not articulable, something that we can't put into words, that is, why do I love donuts so much? I just don't know. If you think about your desire for a certain food you're craving, for some particular food you like, there's something ineffable in the center of it. Something ineffable in that desire.

What is it that you really want? It's that same desire that is drawing us to spiritual life.

And by doing practice every day, we are creating temptation in a new direction.