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
SHAMBHAVI
Satsang means being in reality together. 'Sat' means reality. Sometimes that's translated as truth. And I want everyone here to think about that.
What in the world does that even mean? I've never been able to think what truth means. I don't know. Does anyone have any actual reference that that word is referring to? It's one of those things that people toss off as if they know what they're talking about. But if you really think about it, it's like, no.
One of the teachers in my former lineage used to say, "Truth is truth. I'm talking about reality." [laughter]
So what's true for people? What's true for a group of people, or a culture, or a religion, or a political group, or a person, an individual, a family. There's things that are true in that very, very micro level. But if we're talking about Truth capital T, it doesn't seem to really refer much to anything.
The word 'sat'— the more proper translation of that word—is existence. Existence itself or reality itself. The ground of everything.
Then 'sang' is a part of a word that is usually tagged on when we want to talk about something coming together. For instance 'sangam' means a confluence. And it's often used to refer to when rivers come together and form one river or something like that.
So 'sat' means reality, and 'sang' is coming together. Coming together in reality. Now, as of course we're already in reality, we already actually are reality. But we have forgotten that in large part.
Of course, you haven't forgotten it totally, or you wouldn't be here. You'd be off somewhere drinking a pink drink. Right. You'd have taken—what pill is it that is the pink drink pill? I never remember—the red pill or the blue pill? I think it's the red pill that's actually the reality pill. Which doesn't make sense to me because in our tradition, blue is always the basis of everything.
So the process of having forgotten reality in some measure is just the natural process of how things come into existence. How they come to be. How we come to be. There's absolutely nothing wrong. When I say you've forgotten largely about reality, you don't have to feel badly about yourself. That's how everything is made.
Art, you are the art of God, as I've sometimes said. And in order for art to be created, something has to be taken away.
In other words, you can't create a painting with every color. You can't create music with every note. Every work of art is only made out of a subset of things. And the fact that we're only made out of a subset and that our perceptions are limited, that's what I mean when I say that we don't know reality very well.
If reality has infinite notes and we only know seven notes, there's something happening there in our experience, right? We only have the seven notes. We don't have all the notes. And we're never going to have all the notes, actually. But we are going to have a lot more notes than we think is possible. If we should be so lucky.
So Satsang is a very ancient practice where we can just relax and try to remember who we really are. A little bit. Or have a feeling about that. That's what it's for. So it doesn't really matter what we talk about. It doesn't matter what we do. Just being together like this is the practice.
And that's the same with every teaching. We get teachings to help us remember. To help destroy the limitations in our perception. Because not only do we have only seven notes—maybe we have 19 notes—I don't know. It's not that big of a range. But we're very attached to those particular notes. And if someone suggests that we might let go of our death grip on C. And like, scoot on over to G, where we think we've never been before. We can put up a hell of a fight.
So that's why we have anything called sadhana. Sadhana is where you get to resist having all the notes. And where you get to discover little by little the magic of having more notes, more colors.
Every practice that we do, every teaching that we have, every gathering that we have, every Mandala dinner that we have, every time we go to the movies together, every time we go have coffee, every time anyone comes over for tea, that is what it's about. It's about satsang: coming together in reality and remembering that.
And we live in a dualistic experience. We're having a dualistic experience right now. Most of us. Mostly.
So what is the form of duality? The form of duality is dialogue. The form of duality is dialogue. It's dialogic. It's a place of conversation.
Most of you who have been around for a while know that one of the primary metaphors for all manifest life in this tradition is the city. That is a primary metaphor for this life that we're having together.
And a city is a place where we go to meet people. To have experiences. To see new things. To get engaged. To participate. And that's where we're trying to head. Is to be in the city but have the perspective of everything being unified. Everything being one, and continuous, and full.
So when we have teachings, they're in the form of conversation. And when we have satsang, which is pretty much the purest form of sadhana, I think. If we're talking about learning how to play in duality, but be more realized. This is called jivanmukti: liberated in life. It means playing in reality. Playing in this experience just as it is, but from a more realized perspective.
That's the goal of this. Is to become more aware of how things actually are, and then be able to play here rather than suffer. To join in the conversation as a form of play rather than suffering.
Satsang is a very pure form of sadhana because it's all dialogic. We gather in a little mini city. And people can talk about whatever they want. Whatever you want to talk about. You can talk about just as if you were in a cafe in a city. And we have questions and answers. So it's dialogic.
And all of the scriptures are written in a dialogic form also. All of the scriptures of Trika are written in a form of a questioner and an answerer. Some form of Shiva and Shakti being the questioner and some form being the answerer.
And of course we also have other things happening: shares, rants, raves, complaints, whatever needs to happen. But there's really no thing that you can't talk about here. And that is the first step toward becoming more free.
Because maybe in your other life, outside of satsang, you're, "Oh, I can't talk about that. Oh, I can't ask that. Oh, no, this is not okay." You're constantly monitoring yourself.
So the first thing about satsang is you don't have to monitor yourself. You will because you have such a strong habit pattern of monitoring yourself.
And you also have—many of you—all kinds of ideas about what is spiritual and what is not. But we're in a nondual tradition. Everything's the same. It's either all spiritual or it's all not spiritual. It doesn't really matter what you call it.
But there's no differentiation between somebody asking a question about house cleaning and problems with roommates, versus someone asking a question about some esoteric point of scripture. There's really no difference.
And Ma, Anandamayi Ma, one of her principal disciples remarked that when people would ask Ma questions about scriptures and practices, she would answer. But if they asked her a question about some interpersonal problem they were having, she would get very excited about that. She liked to get into the nitty-gritty of everyday life with people. Now that was one person's perspective, but I always thought it was cute.
STUDENT 1
I noticed that honesty is a really big theme in this tradition. And you talk about honesty a lot. So I was wondering if you could just talk a little more about it.
SHAMBHAVI
There's lots of ways to talk about honesty. But first of all, you really can't get anywhere in your sadhana with dishonesty. Like lying to yourself or lying to other people. Refusing to look at what needs to be looked at. Refusing to say what is. That's just all being in a state of fantasy or willful ignoring. And that's just not a basis for waking up. The only basis for waking up is clear seeing.
The other aspect that I could talk about is that in Ayurveda, honesty is related to what's called your ojas. Ojas is your basic immunity and your fundamental health, your fundamental juiciness. And your protective aura is part of your ojas. And ojas is also the bridge from individualized love to universal love. So it's very much related to the quality of love.
In Ayurveda, honesty protects and builds your ojas. It protects and builds your immunity. It's a medicine. That's another aspect.
The other aspect, and this is related to the medicinal quality of honesty, but honesty is relaxing. When we're honest, we no longer have to protect anything. We're not protecting our self-image. We're not protecting what we have and what we don't have. We're not protecting ourselves from other people. And that is deeply, deeply relaxing.
The other thing that's relaxing about it is it is always relaxing to be in integrity with yourself. There can be storms swirling around you of disapproval, or criticism, or uncertainty. But if you are in integrity with yourself, you have something to stand on. In a sense, you become unassailable.
Not that you become unresponsive to those other things. But you have a kind of sturdiness and good feeling about yourself when you are being in integrity with yourself.
So for each person, you might have some differences in what integrity means to you. To me, honesty is the cornerstone of integrity.
That doesn't mean that you have to spill your guts to everybody you meet. Because there's also discernment. But it does mean that when words are coming out of your mouth, that you aren't lying. And that you're not withholding something that needs to be spoken.
Sometimes when we were living in Maine, when people were very, very unfamiliar with these kinds of traditions, people would ask me, "Oh, what do you do?" And I just said, "I teach meditation." It's a partial description. I didn't feel the need to explain Trika Shaivism to somebody.
So that's what I mean. It doesn't mean you have to disclose everything in some maniacal way. You use discernment about what's appropriate. [laughs] But still, to be an integrity with oneself is absolutely a wonderful way to be in the world. And deeply, deeply relaxing.
STUDENT 2
I was wondering if you could talk about that edge between when difficult things happen. What in us can take them as heartening versus disheartening?
SHAMBHAVI
Well, from the bigger perspective, every disheartening thing is as full of wisdom as every heartening thing. One of the reasons why we can flip-flop around between finding something disheartening or devastating, or finding some reason to see some solace in that same thing is because: are we noticing the wisdom there? Or are we not?
So that's one big, big, big answer. At 12:15, we're not noticing the wisdom. At 1:45, we suddenly notice it, and now suddenly you feel a little heartened, right?
The other reason is that we have karmic tendencies. And those tendencies, they're forced, they're shakti, they have energy. And they move us in certain directions. The definition of karma is something that we aren't 100% aware of, and that is taking us rather than us being in charge. Our karmas, sort of, they're in the driver's seat, more or less.
Sometimes we have a karmic tendency—or an energetic tendency, or a psychological tendency, call it what you will—to feel negatively about things. Or to gravitate towards feelings of sadness, and despair, and rage. Those are all from the realms. The realms lay out these big patterns in our lives of what emotions we have more of a karmic groove with.
So if someone has a karmic groove with the emotion of sadness, they're going to go there. They're going to experience something. At one time, a few weeks ago, I said something celebratory about the new space. And somebody responded, "Well, I hope this one sticks."
That's a very karmically inflected kind of response. That person was already experiencing future loss or projected future loss based on some feeling of loss they had about something else. Some other space that we had. But that's a thing where we're not even—I'm sure that person was not aware at all of that pattern. That in that moment it just came out.
We can also have patterns of always seeing the best in everyone, or being obnoxiously optimistic. [laughs] That can happen, too. We've got all of that at play, depending on where we're at karmically. And where we're at in terms of being able to discern the wisdom of something.
What it means in part to discern the wisdom is to realize how we're being helped. How are we being helped when the Chinese invaded Tibet and basically took over and they murdered a million Tibetans? At that moment in those years, there was a lot to feel despondent and despairing about. And there still is.
But at the same time, a country that was basically sequestered from the rest of the world in a tradition or a group of traditions that was very hard to access, now has spread all over the world like seeds. Tibetan Buddhism is one of the major religious sets of traditions all over the world now. Most of us have benefited from that in some way or another.
I know I have benefited from studying with teachers who I never would have heard of, let alone met. And having really wonderful teachings from them. And these are people who, some of them were in Chinese labor camps. Some of them were wounded. Some of them were tortured. Some of them never even lived in Tibet because their family had to leave before they were born. You know and horrible things happened to them.
And I've also—and I'm sure other people have—benefited from seeing how they've related to those horrible experiences. How as practitioners, as very good practitioners, they related to being tortured. How did they relate to being in a concentration camp? How did they relate to being injured? How did they relate to losing their country?
So there's just sadness and grief. And there's also a sense of gratitude.
And I think a third piece that I would point out is that when we're further along in our degree of waking up, we directly experience the beauty in even the most difficult emotions. And that's a little harder to grock from a certain perspective.
Somebody said to me, I don't get how you're digesting all of this that's happening in Gaza right now. Looking at everything every day, I mean. And it's because the depth of things that I'm feeling is also a depth of beauty, in a sense. It's not that I want those things to be happening. I don't. But there's something that's also there that the emotions themselves have a beauty. It's hard to put into words, but anyway.
There becomes more emphasis on that. It's not a not caring at all. Sometimes people think that about these kinds of teachings. But it's a caring more, but caring in a different way.
I mean, this is why so much beautiful poetry and music gets written from the worst circumstances. That's like the essence of the beauty of those circumstances. It's impossible to put into words what that is doing to us. But I feel grateful for being able to see this.
I mean that's not the only thing I feel. But I do feel grateful for having the opportunity to witness this. I feel like there's a whole aspect of humanity, and life and death, that I would never come into contact with if I were not seeing this. I feel it's part of my education as a human being to be witnessing this. This full spectrum of what we are capable of.
I'm going to be 68 in a few weeks. And there was just genocide after genocide when I was growing up. So It's not like I didn't know about these things. And it's not like I didn't see photographs either. I did see photographs. But nothing like this. Nothing. Nothing. And it was very easy to look and then look away. That is not easy now.
But I feel like my whole view of humans and what we are is changing. And that's valuable. To not be in a state of ignorance about that.
I also saw a video of a dog playing a game with its owner. You know those games with the blocks where they're in a tower? And you pull individual blocks out to try to not...
STUDENT 2
Jenga.
SHAMBHAVI
Ok this dog was playing this game with its owner and winning. [laughter] And I thought to myself, if we all could recognize who we actually are—the human species—and who other species actually are, how would that change things? So much for the better.
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