The Equality of All Phenomenon

SHAMBHAVI
In direct realization traditions and specifically the ones I've studied in—Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen—the definition of self realization is recognizing and embodying the equality of all phenomena. There are many, many ways of talking about self realization, but that is the most precise definition of self realization.

Remember that there's three basic components of any direct realization path. One is recognition. For recognition, you need direct introduction in order to re-recognize your real nature. You need to have a circumstance arise where you can be directly reintroduced to that in an experiential, direct way, without the intercession of reason or logic.

Wisdom is what is giving direct introduction, and sometimes wisdom, of course, is arising in the form of a teacher. That's very, very common.

The principle of direct introduction or transmission in Trika Shaivism is called grace, kripa. Trika Shaivism always puts things in a somewhat more devotional language than Dzogchen or a lot of other Tibetan traditions—which is one of the things that I really like about it—which makes it sound like they're talking about something different, but they're really not.

The three components or basic building blocks of practice, both in Trika and Dzogchen, are you receive introduction or transmission so that you can re-recognize your real nature, so that you can have a concrete experience of it.

Concrete doesn't mean that it's not subtle, it just means it is palpable. It's something that you can recognize and then that recognition component continues until you recognize beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This is the teaching, that even if it's subtle, that you no longer can doubt that you have recognized that, that you have experienced that.

Interestingly, one of the ways that you move beyond doubt, aside from just relaxing and allowing yourself to experience it, is by doubting. The path includes getting to utter confidence in living presence via entertaining some doubts so that you can have the experience that you encounter something that really doesn't care about your doubts.

Eventually, if you're really being open to the introduction, you can throw as many doubts at it as you want, but it's not going away because it's your real nature.

Hakuin, the great Zen master, said great doubt leads to great certainty. And there's this whole concept in Zen of great doubt, like a very, very important component of practice.

So even though I'm saying that we want to recognize presence beyond a shadow of a doubt, we want to have utter confidence in our recognition at some point after having many, many opportunities to experience introduction, that doesn't mean we should be afraid of doubting.

In fact, we should entertain our doubts. We should voice our doubts to the teacher. We should not throw them away because they're valuable. They eventually lead to confidence.

Once we have recognized then we continue and we practice so that we can have a more continuous experience of that direct perception of the self. It's really a perception that involves all of the senses. It's a whole person experience, it's not just a visual or brain—it's not intellectual at all.

While we're continuing to relax in our real nature and having that experience slowly over time become more continuous, we are also integrating that with our everyday lives.

Notice that at the end of every morning practice we talk about integration and how can you begin to integrate whatever it is that you've experienced. This is the essence of the practical aspect of what we're doing—that we're not trying to just have one off experiences—great, wow experiences of some sort that we could put on our spiritual resume.

We actually want to be resting in our real nature with recognition, embodying that all the time, 24/7, eventually even in our sleep.

So we begin to practice integration, which is the third component almost from the very beginning. And that is also a hallmark of direct realization practice—that we're not going linearly. You can think of it more as like horizontal planes or levels where we're doing all three at the same time.

So you keep getting introduction every time you show up and you continually are trying to recognize and remain in that and you're doing integrated practice at the same time.

These are not linear, although you can't really integrate until you've recognized—what would you integrate? You have nothing to integrate. So in a sense, there's a little bit of linearity, but not a whole lot.

What we mean by the equality of all phenomenon is direct perception that we have when we recognize the nature of the self. As Abhinavagupta puts it, recognizing it inside or recognizing it in one circumstance or in one way means that you recognize it everywhere.

You can't just recognize it in one place or in one being. Once you recognize it in one place or in one being it becomes instantly clear that it's everywhere.

So we may focus more on—I experienced something in my heart space—but having had that recognition, it becomes clear that it's everywhere. Everything is made out of that, that it permeates everything.

That is what is meant by the equality of all phenomenon—that we see how everything is and that everything is arising of and by and full of this living presence.

So even though we all have our unique dimension, that unique dimension is also full of, as Abhinavagupta said, the glory and the glamor of God consciousness. The glamour part is the magical display of all these unique arisings.

So your unique dimension is an aspect of that God consciousness, that living presence. Every single thing that you are expressing or showing up as is that glamor and glory of God consciousness. There's nothing else here.

So even though we all have this totally unique dimension, even that dimension is made of wisdom. It's made of that aware, alive wisdom. So everything is made of the same thing. It’s not a thing, but everything has complete equality on that level, on every level, really.

We relate to circumstances differently—I'm not going to go to a car repair shop and drink transmission fluid the way that I would drink tea in a cafe. Those are different circumstances. [laughs] Can I have a transmission fluid latte, please? I mean, I'm just not going to do that.

But at the same time, I can have the experience, the direct experience, that all of those circumstances have total equality. And where this really comes into play is in lessening our level of reactivity to life because everything here is, as Ramakrishna said, a playground.

And what is being played with are perceptions and the senses, including the emotions. The equality does not imply sameness of affect or sameness of response or sameness of emotions—does not imply that because all of the things being felt here are being felt with enjoyment by this entire reality.

In the same way that we go to movies, this is a direct symbol—you could say that works of art, including movies—movies are just an easy example—works of art are a gross form of what is happening everywhere in creation.

Forms are being produced out of light. Experiences are being produced, emotions are being produced, sensations are being produced. And they're all enjoyable when we have a more enlightened perspective.

Of course, they're not all enjoyable now because we still are experiencing separation.

When we go to the movies we are very much like God in the sense that we see horrible things and we enjoy them.

I just watched a bit of The Boys. It's about corrupt superheroes. It's quite clever, but it's very gory. So even though it's kind of a fun satire on superheroes, you could never have your kid watch it.

Many, many times per episode people's heads getting blown off and just splattering their brains and blood against the wall behind them and people getting their chests punched in and their hearts ripped out and their limbs ripped off. And the camera just goes up really close to these gaping holes in people's bodies, at severed, ragged edges of their ripped out arm sockets and.... [laughter]

So the thing is, someone finds this enjoyable. It's there because people would find it enjoyable. And yet, of course, when we're in our “real” lives we don't find any of that enjoyable. I mean, we'd be absolutely horrified.

My point is that there's nothing here but light and awareness and wisdom. If we think of the arts, they're made of intelligence and light and color. The same with everything here.

And in fact Abhinavagupta calls God the artist and he's called a magician in the Tibetan traditions. Not he, but this reality is referred to as magical. And Lord Shiva in the Trika tradition is referred to also as a magician.

There isn't really much difference between what's going on here and the movies except that this is God's movie. This is where God comes to experience brain splattering and so all, but lots of other things too. But everything that's happening is the same subjectivity. So nothing is really happening.

STUDENT 1
The difference is, on TV, no human beings actually suffer and in real life human beings are actually suffering.

SHAMBHAVI
There are no human beings.

STUDENT 1
But there are in the sense that we experience this.

SHAMBHAVI
There is no we. This is what the equality of our phenomenon means. We're talking about absolute now. Each of us is that alive, aware reality showing up in this way.

There's no one actually dying or suffering or being born. None of this is really happening, just like in the movies, just like when you dream something. You can have a horrible nightmare, but none of those beings in that nightmare are actually what you think they are when you're dreaming.

So then you wake up and you realize, Oh, that was a dream. This is God's dreaming. There's an exact as above, so below. Reality works the same way all the way down. Maybe this will help you to understand it.

The fact that we are involved—pretty much 24/7 from the minute we wake up until we dream at night—we're involved in making up stories. We're involved in imagining things. We're involved in aesthetic experience. This is the nature of this reality.

It's not just that we're doing it by accident or because human beings do that. Think about how extraordinary it is that we get up in the morning and we start imagining what's going to happen during the day.

And we care about the colors and the form and the textures of our clothing, and we're putting together an aesthetic experience when we get dressed, and we're doing the same with our food, and we're having these internal dialogues and images about things that aren't happening.

As Thinley Norbu says, the past is a fantasy because it's already happened. If we think about the past, we're just fantasizing.

The future is a fantasy because it hasn't happened yet. So if we think about the future, we're fantasizing.

And the present is also a fantasy because we can't get a hold of it. So when we think about the present even we're fantasizing because there's nothing to grab onto that would actually not be a fantasy.

So we are involved—if we're being even in our sense of separation—we're being in a state of creating non-existent thoughts and realities all day long.

And then we gossip with people, we tell more stories, and we make up stories about ourselves, and then we plan, and those are other stories. And then we watch stories online all day long, and we watch stuff at night on the TV. And then we go to sleep and we're still not done. We just start dreaming stories.

You know this is extraordinary! If you denaturalize it, if you step back from it for a minute, it's like, whoa! We think we're these serious beings. So serious, doing important things.

But 24/7 we're in a state of fantasy, and we're enjoying it, and we're being creators in our own little, little, little way.

So of course it's compulsive and this alive, aware reality is not compulsive, but what we're doing is reflecting the nature of the enlightened self. But we're doing it in ways that have a unique dimension that involves some limitation.

This is what Lakshmanjoo called the bitter medicine. We don't want to know this. We want our lives to be very important. We want to care about everything instead of just have natural compassion manifest.

This isn't something you can really understand with your intellect. You have to experience it in the morning when we do practice to see if you can relax at the end and what can you experience?

The purpose that it serves to hear these teachings, which are absolute teachings, is that it dislocates you a little bit out of your overheated sense of the urgency and importance and meaningfulness of everything. [laughs]

STUDENT 2
Do you feel like you experience an equality of all phenomena?

SHAMBHAVI
To an extent, yeah. Sometimes more than others, but yes. I don't feel so hugely identified with this as you feel identified with your this. What I care about is getting to play with as much knowledge and freedom as possible.

STUDENT 2
That experience of being able to play, at least in your experience, it's not equal to the experience of not being able to play?

SHAMBHAVI
Well it would be much more equal if I were more enlightened. [laughs] Swami Lakshmanjoo said, we can approach Lord Shiva but we can't actually be Lord Shiva.

In other words, I'm never going to come out here on a Wednesday night satsang and say, I am everyone and everywhere. [laughter] That's not going to happen.

At the same time, I have had in my everyday experience something of this direct experience of the equality of everything. And what does that mean? It means that I'm just easier about things.

It means that I have more capacity to host everyone than you probably do or some other people do and not freak out when people behave in certain ways. It means that after a lifetime of political activism my level of feeling of the urgency of the whole thing has—pshew—plummeted.

I'm not completely enlightened here. [laughs] I'm on the path just like you guys are—maybe somewhat ahead so I can give you some advice.

I just don't think that much realization is vouchsafe to a human being unless there's someone like extraordinary, like Anandamayi Ma.

It just occurred to me to say that there are also many traditions that reinforce our urgency and our sense of meaning and of the importance of what's happening here. This isn't that.

No matter what argument anyone makes about—don't we have to feel a certain way about thus and such?—my answer is going to be no. [laughs] That's going to be just too uncomfortable for some people.

Every tradition is made for somebody, and this tradition is really unsettling for exactly the question that you raised. Really, really unsettling for some people.

The basic teaching is that this is not about right and wrong, that there is no right and no wrong, that this is not about truth.

If there's no right and wrong, what is there? There is goodness without an opposite, goodness without evil, goodness without badness. That there is self-expression—svatantrya—creative, crazy self-expression.

As Ma said, God has created a madhouse for his own enjoyment. So she taught these exact same absolutist teachings about the creative, playful nature of this reality.

It doesn't have importance or meaningfulness. It has beauty, it has magnificence, it has magic. It has all of the virtues—compassion and sweetness and goodness.

But it doesn't give us a place to stand that makes us feel important or that our lives have meaning or that we're doing the right thing. That doesn't give us that. In fact, it continually undermines that.

This is one of the huge differences between this kind of tradition—not just Trika Shaivism, but Dzogchen also—and most of the way that American Buddhism is taught.

People feel much more comfortable with American Buddhism because it gives us all those places to stand and gives us the security or a structure for feeling that we're being good. Our actions are causing us to be good. Our actions are causing us to be compassionate.

This tradition doesn't give us that. This tradition says, compassion just is. It's part of the fundamental nature of reality. Our actions are not causing it or taking anything away from it.

This is definitely intellectually unfathomable unless your heart already knows it. If your heart already knows it, then your mind, your intellect can follow along to some degree or another—takes years and years.

I had this recognition of the equality of all phenomenon. It was actually a very big moment in my spiritual life. It wasn't something that happened incrementally like almost everything else. It's one of those “spiritual experiences”.

And I was doing this practice for a long time, and then it just happened. I was, like, sitting at my altar and was like, whoa. [laughs] And I just had this very direct, all over, total experience of that.

And of course, I still have samskaras. I still have karmas. So there's other things tugging at me. I have other attachments that make it less than a full realization.

But what I'm saying is the reason why I feel comfortable in this tradition is because it spoke to my heart from minute one. And even though I, just like you, I didn't understand 90% of it, my heart knew something.

I would ask you to just look to your heart, and then if your heart is just like, no way! [laughs] that's good information, right? And you should have confidence in yourself.

So one of the things that we can always look toward is that the teachers we most admire in these traditions—are they less loving and more mean and cruel and uncaring after their many, many decades and perhaps lifetimes of practice, despite having this horrendous view that all things are equal at the level? [laughs] What is their actual bhava? What is their actual activity in the world?

They are more kind, more loving, more compassionate, more caring, more caretaking. Why is that? That's weird. There's something in it that despite the fact that I profess this horrible view, yet I'm still the way that I am—more loving than I was before I started this practice.

STUDENT 3
Could you say a little bit more about something you mentioned a minute ago that Thinley Norbu said where past is fantasy, and future is fantasy, and present being fantasy…?

SHAMBHAVI
Well the present itself is a fantasy construct. It's like a point in time that you can never really grasp because linear time is always on the move. Present is not presence. Presence is not linear. It's like an all encompassing volume of everything.

But if we're trying to think of linear time—past, present, future—where is that present? The minute we start thinking about it, whatever we're thinking about is already a fantasy because it's already gone. There is really no present.

It's like an imaginary point on a line, but it's in constant motion, so it can't ever be captured.

STUDENT 3
Well I have a question I’ve had, kind of like […] which is, um, about thoughts. What are they? What are they doing? [laughter]

SHAMBHAVI
Well, I love that you're asking this question. There are certain things that people talk about, especially in Buddhist communities or more traditional Hindu communities, where everyone's like talking about these things like thoughts, like they know what they are and, you know—yeah, thoughts bad! Get rid of them, you know… [laughs]

But nobody ever stops to ask well, what is a thought really? And what are they really doing? It's the same thing with emptiness. Some teacher says something about emptiness and everyone goes—oh yeah, emptiness, good. Mhm. [laughs]

We should ask the same thing about all of these foundational concepts. What are they really?

Thoughts are first of all a phenomenon being produced by this alive, aware reality. So thoughts are, in that sense, as a phenomenon being produced, are no different from bodies or airplanes or circumstances that arise and subside.

So they're an aspect of the display of impermanence with total equality to everything else. And this is why we say unmind the mind. Don't worry about your thoughts.

It's the same thing. We would say, don't stop doing your sadhana just because the cow walked in front of you. Thoughts are the same. The cow is going to wander around, do something and then wander off.

Thoughts are just phenomenon just like that. They're made of the same awareness and energy that everything else is made of. Obviously, thoughts are more subtle on some level. They are more of a subtle experience than this microphone, for instance.

But they obviously have tremendous power because they can rule our whole lives and make us feel a lot of things and effect our body energy and mind. So as despite being subtle they are little powerhouses.

Thoughts and emotions are not very different. Most of the thoughts that we have, they're actually indistinguishable from emotions.

There might be some thoughts that are more purely analytic, somehow not quite so bound up with our emotions. But most of the thoughts we're experiencing them also energetically because we're experiencing them along with emotions.

You could think of them as bodies. Every phenomenon is an aspect of the body of God. So just deities and people and animals and plants and worlds and thoughts and emotions and colors and circumstances, these are all being produced within this infinite subjectivity. So they're part of its, in a sense, its body.

But they're really not different from other phenomena. There's nothing unique about them in an ontological sense.

They have much less appearance of independence, of course, than beings. They're much more simple.

Although, you know in my encounter with hungry ghosts, noticing that they're basically one thought beings. They have some sort of appearance of what we would call a body, but they basically only have one compulsive thought. “He left me and he didn't say goodbye.” They just keep repeating that over and over again.

I would say that a thought could produce a body which would be a slightly less subtle phenomenon. A ghost is more ethereal than we are, but it's being produced by this thought that won't go away. This emotion—well, it's not really just a thought, but it's like an emotional thought.

STUDENT 4
And thoughts produce actions which produce other things eventually, too.

SHAMBHAVI
Think of it not as them producing things, but being in a cascade. So they're expressing something. They're expressing some dimension of whatever this person is. And so the thought is sitting behind the action, is in the more subtle part of the cascade before you get to some physical action.

I don't want to think about thoughts propelling things or making things happen. They're just like vehicles in a cascade toward something that appears to be more manifest.

Like if I have continual worrying thoughts and then I also get a stomach ulcer—well stomach ulcers are produced by bacteria—but some stomach problem from worrying a lot, the stomach is kind of a very gross manifestation. But behind the thought is other, more subtle karma. And behind that is Paramashiva.

STUDENT 5
If everything is happening within one subjectivity, what is the need for call and response?

SHAMBHAVI
It's fun. It's enjoyable. One of the living symbols of all manifest reality is a city. So the reality is often referred to as a city in the Tantrik traditions, not just Trika, but also the Shakta traditions from Bengal.

And that experience of meeting and the experience of worshiping and the experience of playing the role of the shishya and guru or devotee and teacher is expressing this really wonderful form of enjoyment that the Lord is producing for himself. Having that experience of meeting and the gladness in meeting everything.

It's like meeting your own creation. And I've often compared this to when you make something, it doesn't have to be art, but it could be art, or it could be a cake or a nice meal or—there's that moment, maybe many moments, when you stand back and you just look at it and you enjoy it.

And it's like you have this weird, uncanny experience that you've brought something out of yourself and it's separate, but not separate.

Maybe you have this experience with a child too? I don't know. I've never had a child. You know like, oh my God, my child is out there, but it's also me. Weird. [laughs]

It's like made of my body, right? But out there. And how pleasurable that is, how enjoyable that is?

Reality has very simple principles and it works the same way everywhere. So everything that we're experiencing has an enlightened corollary.

Beautiful thing about that is we can find the understanding of God through our everyday lives because it's all here, just in a somewhat more reduced form.

I always say I'd be the world's lousiest house painter because as I'm doing the roller on the wall I’d just get fascinated with the flow and the texture of the paint. And then I literally stop rolling every two minutes just to step back and look at it and feel good about it, and then…[laughs]. I would be like the most inefficient house painter. [laughs].

God is enjoying all of this as this uncanny experience of outside, inside, self, not self—and calling response is the way that that works.