What Is God, Identifying With the Eternal, and How to Consult Wisdom

SHAMBHAVI
When I was first starting out on this path, as many of you know, the way that God was described in Trika Shaivism or Kashmir Shaivism was very clinical. It felt very clinical to me.

God is consciousness and energy. Who could care about that, really? It was interesting, but it didn't move me in any way. [laughs] And I was kind of coming from a semi-atheistic place in any event.

Right before I was initiated for the first time, I went to my teacher and I said, is it okay if I don't believe God. And he said, it's okay for now. [laughter]

In any case, later, much later than that, I had some direct encounters with reality that showed me what God was. And then I kind of understood what the brouhaha was about.

Basically, in this tradition, God is a synonym. It's the same as saying all of reality. There's no separate God apart from all of reality.

God is you and me. God is the air between us. God is space all around us. God is all of the feelings that we have, all of the sensations that we have.

God is every circumstance. God is every world and every realm. God is every limitation and every capacity. God is every big box store. [laughter] God is every scripture, and God is every trashy magazine.

Everything is made of and made by what we could call God. Made of and made by.

According to this tradition and according to my personal experience, everything is made of the same thing, and that thing is living wisdom. This is what I discovered during those direct encounters.

That actually God is a vast intelligence full of virtue and wisdom, and curiosity and humor, and creativity and delight, and happy hi-jinks, and tenderness and compassion, and I could go on.

But I learned during those direct encounters that that is what everything is made of.

So rather than, for instance, us HAVING compassion, like MY compassion, compassion is actually part of the fabric of reality. And we're just instances of that if we happen to express it.

Everything that we are, in some form is everywhere. And everything has total equality. Everything.

Insentient things and sentient beings. Horrible people and wonderful people. Every kind of person, every kind of animal, every kind of world. We all have total equality on the level that we are all made of the same thing.

We are all made of living wisdom. And we are all expressions of that living wisdom.

We have no independent existence. We're all happening WITHIN that one Self, that one living wisdom. THAT wisdom, which has self-awareness.

In that it has self-awareness, self-awareness fills everything. In that it has self-awareness, it's like a person. Or we could say that in that we have self-awareness, we're like God.

Because everything is filled with self-awareness, we can personify it. This is why I said at the beginning that God is a person and a feeling, and not either of those things only.

So we can personify God. We can say God is Shiva, or God is Shakti, or God is Ganesha, or God is Vishnu, or God is Krishna, or God is Christ, or God is whomever. We could say any of those things. Because we are person-like in the same way God is.

In other words, we can self-reflect, and God can self-reflect. This entire reality is alive and self-aware. That is what God is.

And that's why God is moving. God is full of devotion. When you discover this, you become full of devotion, too. Seeing this and experiencing this makes you feel devotion. It is so awesome. And that's why there's anything we would even call God.

If someone describes God as consciousness and energy, I'm like, okay, next. That doesn't invoke anything. It's just some sort of scientistic description.

But when you actually encounter this, then you just feel awestruck. And you feel full of all the virtues that this is made of. That's why the God part is our relationship to that. It's inevitable. This is why devotion is inevitable, no matter what path you're on.

God is everywhere and God is everything because THAT is full of all of those wisdom, virtues, and intelligence beyond measure. And that's what reality is. And that's why we're doing this, so we can discover that and have a different kind of life.

STUDENT 1
I was wondering, what does it mean in the chant when it says, may I be free from the bondage of death, but not from immortality?

SHAMBHAVI
This is part of the Mahamrityunjaya chant.

We have our experience of impermanence, where things are coming and going, being born and dying, or coming into existence and then going away. And then what are they coming into existence from and going away to? This is a good question.

And the major teaching symbol for this is an ocean with waves. The waves are the coming and going, and the ocean is that eternal substrate of everything, the ground of being.

So the waves are made of ocean. They are aspects of ocean. They're expressions OF the ocean. They're continuous with the ocean, and they arise and then they subside.

So this is OUR situation. We are made of the natural state. We are made of natural wisdom and its energy. We are arising from it, partially.

We have a quasi-independent experience. Just like a wave, which is continuous with the ocean, but we could still recognize it as some sort of quasi-independent phenomena.

A wave cannot get up and start running along the beach, though. So, we cannot separate from the natural state, from that base state of living awareness.

When we arise, we arise from that. And when we go, we go back to that. But there's also the possibility of being aware of that and identified with that while we are still taking these various forms.

And that's what this prayer is talking about. It's saying, let me not identify with the coming and going. Let me identify with the eternal. Let me recognize that I am an aspect of the eternal.

And when we have that direct experience of the natural state as being what we are, then our experience of life changes profoundly. Our experience of time changes profoundly.

We still understand that this form is going to come and go, but we no longer feel that anything is actually being born or dying in any fundamental way. Just like the water that's in a wave just goes back into the ocean, right?

It's just like whatever we're made of is just going to subside—or have an appearance of subsiding anyway—and something else will arise.

This sense of the eternal begins to creep into our everyday lives when we have that direct experience. So we can live enjoying all the displays of impermanence while still feeling that we're an aspect of the eternal. That's what that's about.

STUDENT 2
You speak to first thought best thought, or first sensation best sensation, of learning to follow wisdom, learning to follow where my heart is guiding me. And this year has been really difficult for me to distinguish what that is.

SHAMBHAVI
Well, the more you listen and the more you try to follow that and the more you try to feel that, the easier it gets. Over time. But even in that arc of, the more you make the attempt the easier it gets, there's going to be ups and downs.

It's going to be more obscured some days or some weeks or some months than others. Our journey is very uneven.

And Ma said, coming and going, the thing will be done. And what she meant by coming and going was coming and going in and out of clarity. Coming and going out of knowing what's actually happening. Coming and going out of remembering who we really are.

That whole process is not smooth.

And one of the siddhis that we can have is the acceptance that it's not even, that it's not smooth. And the willingness to just go along with that. And to sit through the times when we have less clarity and feel more confusion and self-doubt.

And just continue putting one foot in front of the other, regardless of that.

You're going to have times when you feel more confusion and self-doubt and times when you feel less. And that's just human life. Until something shifts and you don't go through so many rough patches anymore. That will happen eventually, too.

There are practices that can help you, but there are also times of life when we just ARE feeling more self-doubt. And those times are very productive if we can just let ourselves feel that and be less certain. And not try to scramble too hard back to some sort of effortful clarity.

Because those times are like when the fields are lying fallow and gathering strength. We need those times, too.

But having said that, practicing consulting that upsurge– So we could call it many things. We could call it first thought best thought, first sensation best sensation.

I sometimes call it an upsurge. This upsurge of knowing that is beyond ordinary thought, and beyond argument and beyond explanation or reason, or beyond needing any justification.

That upsurge is always happening, and it would be useful to think about it not as MY heart or MY wisdom, but as THE heart and THE wisdom. That's upsurging within you, but it's not belonging to you. It's a communication that's happening.

There's a few things you can do. One, on Tuesday mornings, we do practice in the heart space at 7:30am Pacific, livestreamed, for half an hour every single Tuesday. And it would be really useful if you could show up for that.

That would give you some more tools and just some experience feeling more in the heart space and getting more in touch with that wisdom that is upsurging through the heart space.

And then, of course, there's many, many forms of inner divination. But the very first one I ever learned, which is something I've shared with students regularly, is called a two roads meditation. So I'll share that with you right now.

There's two ways you can do this. You can visualize yourself standing at a juncture between two roads, one going this way and one going that way. And you do this with your eyes closed.

And if you're trying to make a decision, on one path is all the elements of one decision, and on the other path is all the elements of the opposite decision. Usually, like, I will move to Kansas, or I won't move to Kansas, or something like that.

Then you visualize and feel yourself walking one of these paths. Slowly. And experiencing everything on that path, everything that you think is going to be on that path.

And you just feel how your body feels as you're walking along that path. And how relaxed are you feeling, how spacious are you feeling, or not.

Then you walk the other decision path and check in and see as you walk along everything on that path. How does your body feel? How does your energy feel? And you just choose the path that feels more spacious and relaxed and wholesome.

Those are my words. You can choose your own words. But the path that feels more right in your body and energy. You just do that path regardless of what you think about it. This is to try to eliminate the normal intellectual machinations that we go through.

The other way to do the same meditation, and you can do this if you're feeling really conflicted and confused, and beset by a lot of karmas, is to actually physically walk. Because that will help distract you from your usual machinations.

So you just get up in a room, and you'll have to your eyes open for this, I think, unless you totally clear the room. But you are– In an open space, maybe out in your yard or something, you can close your eyes.

You just walk around a circle. One direction is going to be one of those decision paths, and then you turn around and walk the other way. And again, imagining everything on that decision path and seeing how your body feels as you're walking.

And just choose the thing that feels right, in that sort of super-right way. Like not ordinarily right, like it makes sense. Whenever I say something to a student and they go, oh, yeah, that makes sense, I'm like, okay, they don't get it.

It doesn't have to make sense because the things that make sense are the things we're just conditioned about. It doesn't have to not make sense either. It has to FEEL right.

So, that's one form of inner divination you can do when you're trying to make decisions, and also train yourself to feel what it's like in your body and energy when you're going the right way.

When I'm going the right way, the words that I've felt about it is spacious, feeling like I'm in the path of goodness and sweetness and wholesomeness. Those are my words, but you can find your own.