The Constant Conversation

STUDENT 1
Can we talk about invitation, to invite?

SHAMBHAVI
We know from our practice, the whole practice of Trika Shaivism and other traditions like it, and kirtan, and satsang itself, that everything here in manifest life is working on a call and response basis, and that we're having an experience of there being a caller and a responder.

And that experience, interestingly enough, is what leads us to understand the continuity, because that relationship of call and response is one. There's a sense of a caller and a sense of a responder, but they arise together, and they're always together.

So this is exactly like Shiva-Shakti, that there's a possibility to have an experience of two, which is really beautiful, and yet that experience of two is arising as one, together. You can't have one without the other.

So our entire practice is based on call and response. That's the form of satsang, a traditional form of satsang. There's questions and answers.

It's the form of all of the ancient teaching texts in this tradition, where there's a dialog between some form of Shiva and some form of Shakti that starts every single tantra with different questions about View, and then there's usually practices given.

It's the whole format of kirtan, and it's the whole format of even our seated practice, even when we seem to be doing individual practice.

What would it be if we were not listening for the response to our call? If we are not hearing the call to respond to? I mean, really, what would our sadhana be if it didn't have that sense of dialog?

It would be nothing. It would be like calling in the dark to nothing or not being called. So we all are being called and we're all calling, and we're all responding.

So the invitation, which I wrote about earlier this week, relates to that call and response aspect. It's a fundamental principle of manifest life that is inescapable and working all the way through life.

And one thing I realized in my practice is that manifest life really is very simple in how it works. I have a visualization of like ribbons or lines of rules, like a way how things work, like natural laws, that maybe there's only ten of these things. I mean, it's not a very complicated system.

I see ribbons because it's like working from the subtle to the gross, back and forth all the way through every aspect of life. And call and response is one of those ribbons.

So when we are doing sadhana, we're getting back in touch with those fundamental laws of nature or fundamental life ways of manifest life. We're learning how to perceive them, how to be sensitive to them, how to respond to them appropriately, how to use them to navigate life.

As we go along in our sadhana, that we're in this open field where certain principles are always operating, and we can learn more about those principles and be more sensitized to them as we go along, and discover lots of nuances and ways that they're being played with.

And of course, what are these things? They're like the components of improvisational life.

So invitation is an aspect of call and response. And there's a saying that you probably have heard because it's around the Hindu water-cooler which is, If you take one step toward the Mother, she'll take 100 steps toward you.

That's a part of invitation. The basic invitation of the student to the teacher is that you take one step forward, and then the teacher takes steps toward you.

Invitation in this way is kind of like consent. It's a kind of permission on one level. It's also a welcoming on another level-a recognition, saying that you recognize there's something that you want.

So you have to take the first step, or you have to respond to the steps taken toward you, either one and both.

So sometimes teachers will take steps towards students and then stop and wait for a response. And if there's no response forthcoming, or if the response is resistance, reluctance, and repulsion that are repelling, then there's nothing more that the teacher can do.

If there's no invitation, if there's no permission, no invitation, no sense of welcoming and gladness, then not much can happen.

In the pre-professional times of spiritual life, before everything became a workshop and a brand and a this and a that, the invitation was both a literal and a subtle esoteric necessity. The way that teachers would give teachings in India and Tibet in particular, is that they would get invited.

Somebody with the means to host teachings would invite teachers, and then teachers would itinerently travel around to one invitee after another. And that's how teachings would happen.

Namkhai Norbu has also written about this. He wanted to reintroduce this to the Dzogchen community worldwide. And he wrote this very moving article saying what his vision was.

He talked about having people who had the means, invite him to teach and pay for the teachings so that other people could come and donate or not, but that it would be much more like the older system, where the teacher was hosted by those who had the means and the desire, obviously. You invite someone because you want the teachings.

Then if you have the means, at least in the Tibetan system, you would pay for all the food, you would give the teacher a place to live, you would pay for other people's foods, other students who were coming, et cetera. Then anyone could join in and contribute money or not, but basically, it was by invitation.

So Namkhai Norbu very much wanted to implement this in his community, and I'm not really sure how that went.

That kind of invitation is a literal invitation, but there's other forms of invitation that are more subtle, and then there's some that are extremely subtle, like the forms of call and response and invitation and permissions that are offered between a teacher and a student, not even with words.

You know, it's known whether you're being invited or not, or whether you're being given permission or not, or whether your invitation is being accepted or not. Those things are just known. And then if you're sensitive to those energies, you don't really have a lot of choices.

I don't feel like I have a lot of choices when I invite a student in a more subtle way and they basically say no by not responding. I'm just going along with nature and just trying to let everything happen as it does.

Somebody asked me the other day, what are the requirements for being a student or being in a particular position? I said, there are none. There really aren't.

The requirement is you have to want to do this. That's the requirement. And then you show how you want to do it in various ways, both gross and subtle.

What we've done at Jaya Kula, I mean, permission and invitation is operating at all levels. It always has been, whether you've been aware of it or not as students of Jaya Kula. Certainly in my individual dealings with students, the principle of invitation has always been in operation.

Maybe it's like an older form of consent or something. If you come to me and say, I want you to be my main teacher, I really feel like you're my teacher, there will be one rule, do what I ask you to do. But until you sign on for something like that, you're absolutely free to do exactly what you want to do.

I'm only, and I only ever have been interested in what you want. So it's run on desire.

And if you are someone who's fighting against some fictitious authority and feeling rebellious or locked in or resentful or like you're having to follow rules or something's being asked of you you don't want to do, all that means to me is you haven't taken responsibility for your own desire. Or maybe you can't feel it because you're so conditioned by something else.

But it's not coming from me. I'm following natural law. I'm following natural energy. If you express enough desire, you will get from me so much more than you know.

If you don't express desire, if you don't take at least that one step toward me, then I'll be your friend and I'll give you what I can when I can, but I'll step back. It's just natural.

It's like an improvisation. Everything is run by your desire. If every single person said, I don't want to do seva anymore, I don't want to be on the mala anymore, I don't want to do this, yeah, it would be a scramble, but we'd figure it out.

I'm not here to follow rules. I'm not here to break them just for the sake of being a rebel. I'm not here to be too cool either.

I'm just here to wake up and I'm here to share what I have gained and what I have learned with you. And anyone who wants that can come and get it. And I will be there for you 147,000%, if you come and you want to get it. And if you don't, I'm also totally fine with that.

This isn't about Jaya Kula as an organization. It's not about getting things done. It's about doing sadhana, learning how to be in this world with other people, opening our hearts to each other, doing practice to help us to do that, and then entering into something of the extraordinariness that I've been blessed to have experienced.

So that's what it's about. It's only about that. And whether that involves initiations or not initiations, seva or not seva, jayakula.org or not jayakula.org, whatever it involves, that's what it involves. I'm going to work with the people that show up and who accept the invitation or who offer me an invitation.

That's what's going to happen. And it's going to be in whatever form it needs to be for you to have a chance to enter into the same experience that I've entered into. And that's all it is.

STUDENT 2
When you were talking about call and response earlier and you were talking about sadhana, I feel like I'm struggling to do something well, and I drop into my heart, and then I disappear, and then I drop in and disappear, but I'm not sensing a feeling of call and response.

SHAMBHAVI
Do you have a sense of that presence in the heart space?

STUDENT 2
Yes.

SHAMBHAVI
Do you feel an actual presence?

STUDENT 2
Very occasionally.

SHAMBHAVI
So just keep relaxing and trying to feel that. Call and response means that the Self has appeared in a conversational way, and we can have a sense of that between our teacher and ourselves, between that presence in the heart space and ourselves.

It's that sense of what Rumi called the constant conversation. But we have to have a definite experience of the alive intelligence of that, so that we can relate to it in a more conversational way.

The more you try to find it, you're expressing your desire. So that in itself is a call. Your attempt to find that is in itself a call that will be responded to.

During this pandemic, it's been extremely rough at times, but also really growth-producing for me. And I just did a divination a few weeks ago and got totally yelled at and felt like I had to reorient. And I reoriented, and I got some subtle instruction from Ma about how to do that.

And just the effort that I put into clearing out whatever got me yelled at and relating myself to that presence differently, brought a huge response. It was really surprising. So it's our desire to not be stuck, to not be disconnected.

And the efforts we make to reconnect are a call. They are a call, a really powerful call, even when we screw up.

When this was happening, I was stumbling around for a little bit, not quite knowing what I should do, but I was stumbling with that sense of longing and determination. Even that is a powerful kind of a call. It gets responded to when we do that consistently.

So even if you've only experienced something for fleeting seconds, the fact that you recognize that, if you long to experience that again, and you figure out ways to get back there, that's a powerful call and you will be responded to.

When we have spiritual experience or spiritual opening, we don't want to just go, Oh, cool, and move on to our normal, Okay, well, now it's not there. Okay. We don't want to be fatalistic or passive about that.

When we have an opening, that's a call to us, and we want to respond by trying to wriggle into that opening for longer periods of time, or deeper.

No one can really tell you how to do that. It's a very subtle process. It's a very creative process. It's not the same every time.

I don't know that I ever heard anybody describe anything like this in writing to try to get to the nitty-gritty of what happens when you're in that presence and you're wanting to relate to it more. We have practices we can do, but at the end of the day, it's not actually all about practices. It's about that feeling of yearning and going to meet.