Your Indestructible Value

STUDENT 1
Shambhavi, would you talk about vajra pride?

SHAMBHAVI
The vajra pride is actually a term from Buddhism, and I heard it in the context of my Dzogchen tradition. And vajra means adamantine or diamond-like—something indestructible, clear, eternal.

It also means something that flashes like lightning. So something that is— has a lot of clarity and energy and fierceness.

And when we talk about vajra pride, in essence, we're talking about enlightened pride. Or what would your pride look like if it weren't so squished, constricted, and focused on the preservation of small self?

Unenlightened pride, or contracted pride, is an echo of vajra pride. It's on a continuum with vajra pride. Everything here is on a continuum with enlightened wisdom virtues. All of our foibles and fixations are those enlightened wisdom virtues stepped down or contracted or limited in their expression in some way.

So this is why we don't have to feel badly about ourselves for simply having limitations. Those limitations are the thread by which we draw ourselves closer to the enlightened versions of our limitations.

Pride is one of the, if not the, most prominent bhava—that means feeling orientation—B-H-A-V-A, 'bhava', of humans. And it means that we have an experience of our fragility— experience of our fragility, and we have a question about our value. We don't have full contact with vajra pride, which I'm going to talk about in a minute.

So because we don't have full awareness of, or maybe even any awareness of, vajra pride—our indestructible worth—we have uncertainty. It's built in—it's not anything we caused.

So that feeling of uncertainty about our value comes because we feel separate, and we have lost contact with the fuller versions of those wisdom virtues like compassion and vajra pride—the confidence in our worth. So we have this question mark about our worth, and we go through all sorts of machinations to try to assuage our question about our worth.

And, of course, this flavors and characterizes almost all of human life—that we are trying to project a certain kind of self that we feel is worthy of admiration, recognition, approval, etc. And we do this in all sorts of different ways, all day long [laughs]. And underneath all that is this fragility that is borne of a question mark about our value.

So we're trying to create value when actually we already come with all the value preinstalled [laughs].

Vajra pride is not really definable in any complete sense, but it means a feeling of value that is indestructible—a feeling of worthiness, of being self enjoying, finding oneself magnificent. That is vajra pride. [laughs] How does that sound? Pretty good, huh?

So one of the— what I call living symbols—a living symbol is something that is intimately related to the thing that it's symbolizing, it's not arbitrary—one of the symbols of vajra pride is what's called the hiranyagarbha.

It means golden egg or golden womb. And there's a meditation on the website called Breath Immersion and the Golden Egg that is to help people get in touch with vajra pride—to help you get in touch with your immutable worth.

Now, the only way—this is kind of paradoxical from our perspective, perhaps—but the only way to really grok our immutable worth one hundred percent is to see the immutable worth in everything. In everyone and everything, because our vajra nature is another phrase that's used.

So vajra pride is the feeling that comes along from recognizing one's own nature and an awestruck feeling at the nature of the self.

Having experienced that, we can't just experience it in ourselves. The complete realization of our vajra nature, our adamantine indestructible nature—which is magnificence—can only be realized if we recognize that in everyone and everything.

So we can feel better about ourselves in various ways, but that's not really recognizing vajra pride or vajra nature, because everyone has exactly the same vajra nature. We're all made of the same wondrous, magical self.

There's absolutely no distinction whatsoever between your vajra nature and my vajra nature.

And this is one of the hallmarks of direct realization traditions like Dzogchen and Chan Buddhism and Trika Shaivism. That one of the ways, or the main ways, that these traditions function is by working with a teacher so that you can recognize that your essence nature—your vajra nature—is exactly the same as the teacher's.

And then, having recognized that, you can recognize that it's the same—exactly the same as everything and everyone. That everything is shining with that value, with that indestructible worthiness, worthfulness, value, lovableness, awesomeness, magnificence-ness! [laughs]

There's no real one word for it because it's a— it's a recognition that overtakes you, it's not a definition. It's a feeling attitude, it's a knowing. It's not a definition, so— I'm just throwing about words that kind of point toward it but can't really capture it.

And, of course, this is how we learn to really respect other people when we recognize that everyone has the same value that we do—that we are all productions of that one self, which is the ultimate value. That's where real respect for others comes in, where we can respect everyone's unique dimension no matter how it's showing up.

So we could say that the point of the practice is to realize what's called the equality of all phenomena.

And when we realize that, we are realizing our vajra nature. And from that recognition, instantly there's a feeling of devotion and awe and amazement at the nature of the self—both our self as we showed up and everyone else's self and everything else, everything's self.

So the recognition of vajra nature, of our real nature— and again, vajra nature and vajra pride are not used in Trika Shaivism, they're used in Dzogchen, and I guess in other Buddhist traditions too.

So I'm, you know, answering the question, but it's a great way to talk about the experience as— there's a 14th century wandering yogini in Kashmir, named Lalleshwari, and sometimes she's called Lalla. And she said in one of her vakyas, one of her sayings, that the experience of the realized yogi is continuous amazement.

So we could say that that continuous amazement when encountering the self is vajra pride. But when that is limited by our experience of separation, then we don't have a continuous experience of amazement at the self. We are trying to force others to be amazed at us. [laughs]

And, of course, that's a very uncertain operation. [laughs] And we have to continually keep trying to do that—and we're sort of doomed to failure. [laughs] We're like addicts continually chasing that bag of admiration, propping ourselves up, because we haven't yet recognized that the value that we seek is inherent. It can't be earned, it can't be cultivated, it can't be created, it can't be destroyed.

There's really nothing to do to defend oneself or try to prop oneself up or puff oneself up. All of those things are all expressions of a feeling of fragility and question-mark about our worth. But when we experience our vajra nature and we experience vajra pride, we have no need for any of that anymore.

STUDENT 2
So this kind of dovetails— I've been thinking about a kind of fiery thing you said sort of at the beginning of quarantine. You said something to the effect of—make yourself worthy of living if you survive this.

SHAMBHAVI
I think I was quoting Battlestar Galactica, actually! [laughter]

And it's a story about humans in the future and a race of beings of artificial intelligence who have evolved and who were originally the creation of humans but evolved way beyond the original models—and they come back and wage war on the humans, like children coming back to destroy their parents.

And the humans are very beset. You know, there's not— there's only like fifty thousand of them left after this surprise attack by what are called the Cylons.

So if we think of the Cylons as coronavirus, one of them says to the captain of the ship of some of the survivors says—you know, have you ever asked yourself why you need to survive or if you deserve to survive?

The captain's saying—well, humans must survive.

And Cylon, one of the artificial beings says—have you ever asked yourself if you actually deserve to survive?

So that's where that comes from. [laughs] And if we're talking about on a relative level, we want to think about— are we really contributing what we have to contribute?

For each of us personally, we can ask that of ourselves. Are we contributing a kind word, or are we letting ourselves get swept away by fixated patterns that cause us to be mean or withhold love— something like that? Do we give love? Do we give kindness, do we— are we generous whenever we can be?

Are we doing that as much as possible, are we being courageous? Are we really noticing other people or are we just stuck in a bubble of self concern? Do other people actually exist for us?

I feel that for a lot of people, that I encounter anyway, other people just don't even actually exist. Other people are sort of gray projections on the screen of your internal iPod, you know. Are you actually looking at other people, feeling other people, connecting to other people?

Do you actually care or are you just faking it? These are the hard questions we have to ask ourselves, because what we're having right now is a failure of care on a massive scale.

I mean, it's been going on for a long time, but—I don't mean to sound apocalyptic—it seems like it's coming to some sort of a head. Maybe this isn't the apex of it, you know, maybe it's going to get a whole lot worse, and it certainly could.

But everything that's happening is a failure of care, a failure of compassion, a failure of connection.

And we have to spend less time railing about how other people are failing and really consider—Are we being compassionate? Are we connecting on a, in a real way? Are we actually looking at each other? Are we actually talking to each other when we're talking?

How much of our time is spent fashioning some sort of self image? How much of our conversation is positioning ourselves?

How real can we be? How open hearted can we be? Because that's the only thing that's going to resolve this, is if openhearted people take power. Otherwise, it's just another version of the same old, same old.

And there are cycles of time in the Indian traditions. These are called yugas—eras—very long periods of time that are characterized by different degrees to which humans are able to connect with each other and with different subtleties of reality and different kinds of beings.

So in the Kali Yuga, which we're said to be in now, the experience of separation is at its height. The connection to gods and more subtle beings and more subtle experiences is at its lowest point.

And then as we go into other yugas, we get more contact with more nuanced levels of reality and with each other until finally there's what's called the Satya Yuga, where everything is worship. So Anandamayi Ma, my guru, said that all of these yugas are happening at the same time, that it's not a linear progression.

And so, what yuga are we embodying? Right? [laughs] You might ask yourself that—what yuga are you embodying?

And I actually feel that there's a lot of opening that's happening and has been happening for years in terms of how many people—for instance, in a cold, capitalist, materialist, hyper-hyper-hyper prideful culture like the US—how many people are more interested in spiritual traditions like the ones I've been involved in for most of my life?

I think that's a hopeful sign. But a lot has to be destroyed in order to make that the rule of the land and not the cruelty and coldness that we've been experiencing for so many hundreds of years.

We live in an incredibly cruel culture, and we're all affected by it. And one of the ways we're affected by it is that we're filled with self-loathing. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. What an extraordinary circumstance that so many people feel so badly about themselves.

I hate to be a downer, but [laughs], you know, it's really striking and I think kind of unprecedented. Certainly in the history of the traditions that I've been trained in, it's absolutely unprecedented.

Nobody talks about this kind of thing in any ancient scriptures that I've studied. This, like, very widespread feelings of self-loathing, self-denigration, self-criticism, feeling— just feeling bad about oneself, feeling one is horribly flawed and has all these horrible problems.

And that leads to just unbelievable self-concern. Anxiety is just keeping people in the hothouse of the self—small self. Everyone is turned inward to the nth degree.

Even while we're trying to project stuff outward, we're actually hardly making contact with anything outside of ourselves.

So this is a really extreme situation. And on a relative level, you could say it's brought about by the fact that our actual general cultures are so unloving and uncaring.

We think it's— you know, we've been sold this stuff about psychology—it's our parents did this to us. But no, it's our whole culture—it's not our parents. Our parents are just part of a bigger pattern.

And I think we're seeing that right now—how exhausting it is when the absolute disconnect of government to the welfare of the people is revealed. If we want to know why we dislike ourselves so much or feel like there's something fundamentally flawed about us, all we need to do is look at what's happening in our government, because that is the message that we're— is being beamed at us from all sides.

But the fact remains that our vajra nature has not been affected in any way whatsoever. It's still there for us to discover in any moment of any day. And we still have a clear path to the Satya Yuga for anyone who wants to walk that path.

I mean, it might not happen for lifetimes. If you start walking right now, I have no idea how long it will take. It takes a long time to unpack and dismantle all this other stuff.

But once that happens, you have actually not been harmed. Nothing is flawed. You are just as perfect as God. You are that self—and this is just something we've deeply forgotten.

One of the first steps we have to take is to divest ourselves of this idea that we are a problem or we have problems—or that we're flawed in some way. This is the hardest challenge I face as a teacher— is dealing with a lot of people who hate themselves and just feel that they're somehow fundamentally deficient.

I don't have any roadmap for this. None of the ancient teachers said anything about this. And none of my current teachers— I mean, most of them weren't from the United States. I had one teacher from the United States, but he was just as much a part of this as everyone else.

And the other teachers I've had have been from Tibet or India, and they're, like, clueless about this stuff. And yet it's the most prominent challenge that I face as a teacher— is how to work with people who feel this way.

So we have to work on it together. But I definitely know one hundred percent that nothing has been essentially damaged. Nothing.