Roadside Motels, Black Magic, and Working With the Teacher’s Personality

SHAMBHAVI
Everything depends on your desire. Everything depends on what you want.

There are very few absolute external obstacles. There are some absolute—there are some obstacles that are obstacle-y but [laughs] to sound like I'm a character in Agents of Shield— there are very few of those.

And yet we think there are a lot of obstacles. So I'm going to tell you a story about a hotel room. When I was teaching at Northwestern, it was the cushiest job on earth, I think.

Professors only had to work six months a year, but we got paid a full time salary. The other six months, we were supposed to be writing books and doing that part of the professor-ing.

And we weren't supposed to leave Evanston, Chicago during the six months. Well, who paid attention to that? Nobody. So, every six months, I picked up all my belongings, gave up my lease to my apartment, and went back to California. [laughter]

So I was at Northwestern for three years. So there was three different moves back and forth across the country in those three years. And, so I spent a lot of time on the road and a lot of time in hotel rooms.

I had a lot of time just driving, not just staying in hotels.

So, I had this little box about yay—like a cigar box size, maybe a little bigger than that. And I had my portable altar in there. And as I was driving, I would suss out which motels on the sides of the road had back windows that looked into some kind of woods or open space, and I would purposefully go to a motel.

I would choose motels on this basis, and I would ask for a room in those back parts that didn't face the gas stations and fast food restaurants.

And then I would set up my altar on a chair from the hotel room. I would take my altar cloth out, put it on the chair. Usually, you know, those chairs are disgusting.

Did anyone ever see that Oprah show where she goes around with UV lighting in a motel room? [laughter] It's sort of a thing you cannot unsee. [laughs] Even when you just hear about it.

So I would drive extra time even when I was tired to find this kind of motel that was situated somewhere where I could have some kind of view out to a sky, or a woods, or a tree, or something.

I was doing the rooms that cost 50 bucks a night or 45 bucks a night. I wasn't getting the fancy rooms at all. So they were small, and I would just set my chair up wherever I could and put my altar cloth down and put my little things on my altar and light my incense and do my practice.

And I'll tell you that a hotel room or a motel room can be a courtyard. It can be a liminal space. It's somewhere in between where you left and what your destination is.

And I found that given the right circumstances, it can actually be incredibly fruitful to practice in hotel rooms. They are like a sandhi. They're like a gap in your life.

And sometimes you can relax more deeply because you're in a motel room and you're not in your life. You're somewhere else. I found that to be true.

And I even found that some hotels, motels, had the super magical quality that—I don't know why they had that quality. There wasn't anything different about them. But they almost felt like they were outside of time.

One time I was driving to a retreat. I just do this stupid thing, which we all do, which is—we live in the United States, and we have so many opportunities to be alone exactly where we live, but yet we go travel places to go meditate.

It makes no sense. Anyway, I went to... where did I go? Down south. You guys were...

STUDENT 1
Asheville, North Carolina.

SHAMBHAVI
Asheville?

STUDENT 2
Yeah.

SHAMBHAVI
Asheville, North Carolina. And something happened, and I can't remember why. But there was a reason why I couldn't stay there.

Anyway, on the way back, I stopped at this motel that—it's one of those high rise ones, it's not one of those ranch style ones—that was really at the intersection of all these highways.

It wasn't anything like what I just described with the open sky and the trees. It was in the middle of like an edge part of a big city, and there was all these cars going around on these freeways.

And I walked into this motel. It was just like I was in this magical place. I don't know what happened. I literally could have stayed there for the whole rest of my retreat. [laughter]

It was a little bit David Lynch, it was a little bit something else. I don't know what it was, but I still think about it. And I still think, oh, well, maybe someday I'll find it again, and I'll go stay there for a month and do sadhana. [laughs]

During another one of these trips, I was staying in some motel going back and forth from Chicago to Berkeley. And I did my practice, and I went to sleep.

And as I was falling asleep, I had this incredible teaching from one of the dead gurus in my initiation lineage, showing me things about the cosmos in a motel room.

The other thing I used to do is pull over in those rest stops and just find a place. They have little green areas, right? I would just take my yoga mat out of my car and find a place to sit down and do practice in the rest stop.

One time, there was like a 40 mile an hour driving wind outside. And I was in somewhere like North Dakota. There basically were just heaps of dirt. There wasn't much else there. [laughs]

Everything sort of looked like a black heap of dirt. And there were no trees. And I just pulled over to the side of the highway and walked across some dirt and climbed up on a hill with this driving wind in my face and did mantra japa.

It was great, it was just great to be in the elements like that so strongly. [laughs]

STUDENT 3
I was wondering, is there something inherent about that shamanistic approach of gaining control that is any more problematic than someone who's really interested in getting control of playing an instrument really beautifully, or learning some craft?

SHAMBHAVI
Well, let me say that most of the paths of shamanism are healing paths. So, they're paths for people who want to be able to interact directly with other realm beings who are provoking illness in people.

So, they're interacting with other realm beings on behalf of a person who wants to heal. Or an animal who needs to heal. If we were talking about the Judeo-Christian tradition, we would be talking about exorcism.

But that kind of magic is happening in every culture in the world by different names. And we're also talking about people who can use herbs in very profound ways, people that can work with raw energy in very profound ways.

There are paths that involve a lot of the same things that we interact with as practitioners, but not for the same purpose.

They're for the purpose of healing people or animals or our planet. But there's another swath of that kind of thing. That is more about becoming a master for the purpose of having control over people and the elements.

If you read treatises, practice books, handbooks, tantras that are aimed at this kind of practitioner, they really have to do with this valorization of the individual and the individual's power.

And this kind of heroic, very male masculinist kind of approach.

And it really has a very, very different flavor than learning how to play a musical instrument, becoming a master at that, or being a spiritual practitioner who wants to realize and be of benefit.

It's giving primacy to an individual with a lot of power. So that kind of segment of shamanism, which is not the major aspect of shamanism. A major part of shamanism is healing.

And I think to meet someone who has those capacities is one of the greatest things—that we have access to people that can do that.

I am 110% for that.

But the other thing—it valorizes a lot of aspects of human life, and it's very Titan—that aren't really part of this practice anyway.

STUDENT 4
It can be really abusive, too, right?

SHAMBHAVI
Yes.

STUDENT 4
Murder and torture and mind control.

SHAMBHAVI
Absolutely.

STUDENT 4
It's not just like just learning a skill.

SHAMBHAVI
Absolutely. When you read these manuals, I've perused a couple of these manuals because when I was in grad school I used to sort of haunt the Kashmir Shaivism tantra section of the library.

SHAMBHAVI
And there was just many, many different kinds of books there.

And some of them were these—they were tantras. They were handbooks written by adepts or teachers of some sort for students.

That's what a tantra is.

And they had just, like, lists—to kill your neighbor, to make someone's limbs shrivel, to make it rain, to make it stop raining. I mean, there was certain things that were more innocuous, but there was many, many things in there—to make someone's tongue turn black and explode. [laughter]

STUDENT 5
I was just wondering if those are somehow encapsulated in this view.

SHAMBHAVI
I think they're—not those specific kinds of practices, but there are echoes of that, for instance, in Abhinavagupta's praise of the vira male practitioner who has certain kinds of control over the elements.

So it's very much sanitized, but it still echoes through the chambers of Trika Shaivism in some way or another.

You have to understand that what we are calling Trika is largely the product of many streams synthesized by very well educated, upper crusty, Brahmin, Kashmiri pundits.

They wouldn't sully themselves with this kind of brand, let's just say—what's called the black magic brand. Because there's lots of people in India who think that tantra is just black magic. And it has a very bad reputation in some circles.

And so they were about consolidating a different kind of power, not that kind of power.

And yet you can tell that some of them were attracted to this idea that they could get control of things.

And this is why, although I think Abhinavagupta was brilliant, and the breadth—the size of his view of the world and of spiritual life was astounding, I really much more feel akin to the earlier people like Somananda and Utpaladeva.

Who were very explicitly devotional and...to be of service and to be immersed in Shiva. There was really not any of that in their writings.

And those are the people that I feel more akin to. But I don't want to pretend that those other things don't exist in the tradition. I think that would be a disservice to everybody.

As we get further and further away from the original people who brought us these traditions, they get more polluted by more conservative mainstream cultures. I think that that's a disservice to people.

For instance, all of the ways that Anandamayi Ma been narrated, the way her life has been narrated, to cut out things that don't fit somebody's picture of a saintly, pure person. Somebody's projection of what a saintly, pure person would be like and what they would do.

One time I asked someone who knew Ma in person if Ma ever drank chai. And this person looked horrified, like that would be outside of the realm of this person's view of what a saint would do.

And he said— [scoffs] like there was something wrong with me for even thinking of that question. [laughs]

But later, I found in one of the accounts of her life that she actually did drink chai, and she also chewed beetle nut.

So I think one of the things that direct realization traditions teach us—and perhaps this is not from Trika and more from my interactions with Dzogchen and Daoism—but they really teach that our goal is to be seeing the wisdom in everything without any exception.

And so if we have exceptions for our teachers, like they can't chew beetle nut or they can't drink tea, then— you know, the teachers are our training wheels.

They're our training wheels for being okay with the world, learning how to reconcile ourselves to what is and to see how things actually are. And if we start shearing away things, then we are already shearing away some of our spiritual opportunity.

Now, people have gotten into a lot of trouble with this kind of teaching, so we always have to say something about that. Because this involves actually being able to perceive wisdom, not some projection of what you think it looks like to take your teacher as they are.

When we have teachers who are abusing students or manipulating them, saying, well, in this kind of tradition, you can't criticize me for all the heinous things I do.

Because this is part of the practice, and it's all crazy wisdom and the students trying to go along with that, but not really having the actual direct perception to be able to do that for real.

Then we get into worlds and worlds of trouble with teachers manipulating students and students not really knowing what's going on.

So I think the rule of thumb is for this, that you should understand that we're trying to be okay with the world because we perceive how things actually are, not in some intellectual way.

And the teacher can help us to do this if we are ready to do that. And if we are not, we have to recognize, well, I can't digest this.

I had a teacher who was abusive, and I was able to learn from that teacher and not be particularly harmed. But other people were harmed. So it really depends on what your digestive power is. How much clarity do you have? Do you really understand what the relationship is for?

Or are you just projecting a bunch of imaginings and fantasies onto it?

So it's very, very nuanced.

I couldn't possibly explain it all in one satsang, but we do have to be careful to not let ourselves be manipulated. The best way is to understand our own capacity, the best way to not be manipulated.

But there are many, many teachings, and I think this is true of Ma also.

When I was in Ma's ashram for the first time in Varanasi, somebody who knew her growing up as a child said to me he thought that the western devotees had an easier time being Ma's disciples, and a better time because they didn't have to deal with her difficult personality, quote unquote.

Now, if you have been around Anandamayi Ma block at all, you know that there is no hint of her difficult personality in many, many of the translations or stories about her.

Where was this difficult personality?

It's been excised from many of the renditions of her life. And I already knew that we weren't doing better because we didn't get to see Ma's difficult personality.

We would do much better if we were around her difficult personality, because how many of us have difficult personalities? [laughter]

If we have to have our teacher not be the way people are, how are we going to learn how to be with people as they are? That's why from the very, very beginning, when I started teaching, I just have always tried to let it all hang out, whatever it is.

The most prepared students can work with that.

And so it really is something to think about. Those teachings about the teacher and the teacher's ordinary human stuff or their non ordinary stuff, that is just very challenging for people.