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Philosophy

Everything is Perfect as Passive Acceptance of Karma

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Om poornamadah poornamidam poornaat poornam-udachyate poornasya poornamaadaaya poornamevaavashishsyate

Om Shanti… Shanti… Shanti…..

~Upanishad~

 It’s not unusual to hear the new age refrain that “this is perfect, and that is perfect, everything is god so everything is perfect just as it is.” On one hand, who can argue with this? Who can argue with the deeper wisdom of Mother Nature who brings us both our joy and our suffering; our life and our death? But if we are just to accept our karma and accept our lives as they are then life becomes rather futile and we ultimately lack responsibility for change. If God and nature are responsible, we are then free of responsibility; it doesn’t matter what we do because even the damage and destruction we cause are as natural as tsunamis and earthquakes. But this is not freedom.

Some might look to such an argument to ease their guilty conscience, but it does little to advance the cause of freedom. Some say that since everything is perfect by Nature we might as well work for personal gain. Those we hurt along the way are just receiving the karmic retribution they had coming to them anyways. This is faulty logic.

Mother Nature might hide our free will behind the bounty she provides, but she does not bind us to her contract. The trick that we’re all looking for in our yoga practice, is just the trick that allows us to relate with and exercise our free will. We want to gain power over our own lives so that we become active self-directed agents of our lives rather than passive performers of karma and duty being swept along by nature. Such passive acceptance of karma and the ways of Nature keep people bound to their karma unable to either command or change their lives. This has nothing to do with Tantra.

An Individual who, (though) desirous of doing various things,(but) incapable of doing then due to his innate impurity(experiences) the supreme state when the disruption (of his false ego) ceases.”

~Spandakarika~

Shiva Tantra (Kashmiri Shaivism) teaches the path of consciousness freedom rather than the path of power that so easily binds. It’s said that at the heart of the matter, we have free choice, but in order to really exercise this freedom we have to associate ourselves with Shiva consciousness, the agent of our action. From perspective of deep consciousness, we can know our true nature and act with freedom, recognising that there are choices beyond the typical karmic pathways.

When we act for gain, we associate with those things that provide delight for the mind, the body and the senses; there is no delight in these things for Shiva consciousness. Sensory delights come from outside of our selves and are largely karmically driven. When we follow these karmic pathways, our lives become so predictable that marketteers and psychologists can easily plot our patterns even without the use of astrology. The world of karma is filled with winners and losers. For every bit of gain we make, someone (or something) has had to loose.

A Shaivist knows there can be no gain because they deposit everything into the pool of consciousness rather than use it as is. Everything seems to dissolve into this pool, so we think it is of no use. But if we learn to relate with this consciousness then we can actively make choices in our lives.

Shiva Tantra teaches us how to rise above our karma and the futility of fate. Karma is only binding as long as we maintain our awareness of it and focus only on the actions that that serve somehow to increase our own personal karma. Freedom comes when become aware of the well-head of karma; the pool of consciousness; Shiva.

Philosophy

Meditation on Maya

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Everything has a root! Every idea, every action, every thing that ever is has some root. Getting at the root is often like the voice of a curious child. Where did the apple come from? Where did the tree come from? Where did the sun and the earth and the river and the sky come from? What is the big bang? What is god? And somewhere around these topics you dive for a pearls. You read this and that; practice that and this. You’re just diving down into the ocean, feeling around and coming up with whatever is there. You usually don’t know what you have until you get to the top. Some people are fortunate to have many pearls where they are diving, others have many monsters; but no one knows when some shark will come thru.

What is knowledge? What is not-kowledge? What is a noun? And what is a verb? What is giving? What is receiving? What is knowing and what is not knowing?

We really don’t know what we will find! This is one of the root difficulties we face: we lack knowledge. Right knowledge, some kind of complete knowledge of everything that ever was, is, and will be is incomprehensible for most people even though most will admit that this is the level of knowledge that the universe as a whole is working: right knowledge; complete knowledge. But this is because we usually think of the objects of knowledge as knowledge. Knowledge is not noun, it’s active and non-specific; it’s not the facts, but the way we put facts together. We lack power to change many of the things we would like to change, but this is not because of lack of facts, but the rearranging of those facts to produce action is faulty. Most of us are vastly limited in in our ability to direct and control even our own lives. Cause and effect are routinely studied, but still no one knows what will happen. Actually, everyone knows, but no one wants to talk about it: everything will come to and end someday!

What is infinite? What is finite? Is time linear or circular or both or neither? Where is the root of our lives in time?

Time is another web we find ourselves in. Are we rooted in the womb, or in our ancestors, or are our roots somewhere else entirely. And where will we end? Birth leads to death as sure as anything, but if our roots grow beyond our birth, then it’s reasonable that our branches reach beyond death. And if it’s all circular, then what can we say about the beyond; the beyond will just lead us back to where we are. But as we are, as we perceive this world, we have no control over time. We are swept away as if by a river going to sea. The greatness of time is that it’s the great destroyer, dancing upon the ashes of the past so that new growth might emerge. No one knows what the new growth will be. Every time is completely unpredictable. Or is it? As the planets clock time in the macro-cosmos, so too is the micro-cosmos ever pushed into activity by time. All is moving, all is changing, and all is ever in relationship. We are products of time and time is produced by us: circles swirling with forward momentum. What is moving time?

What is fullness? What is emptiness? What is satisfaction? What is disappointment? What is the root?

I know what moves me: my appetite: for food and drink, love and affection, truth and beauty, or whatever other desire that arises to move about unrestrained. But they’re always restrained, because there’s so rarely a direct route to attaining our desires. We have to enter into relationship. We have to give and receive. Some would say we have to find balance between giving and receiving (between being active and passive); others would suggest we yoke them together.

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Philosophy

The Limitations of Man: a tantric perspective

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To hear some people speak, you would think that humans would die out quickly if we stopped the mental chatter about past and future. Many people are attached to this chatter and there is nothing wrong with this: it’s the differences that make life. To have just one of something is not possible to recognize because recognition needs something else to compare with the first. Things have to go a little out of balance for the whole to exist. Though this “out of balance” has to balance upon something and that something is of course the one.

So, it’s natural and necessary that no one gets along or agrees with each other. This is the ravage of time on embodied existence. These are the effects of the limitations of time, knowledge, power, desire, and the effects of cause and effect itself. Without such limitations where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be here raging against these limitations as we head off to our meditation workshops and places of worship following whatever practices seem to be offering some positive effect this week.

In the mean time, without ever taking a serious look at the natural limitations that turn out to benefit us, we blame the other person or the other group or the other nation for the “curse” of these very necessary limitations. Some traditions put these limitations into the category of illusion. By doing so, they trivialize all that we know of the joys and sufferings of life. If the limitations are mere illusions, then everything that comes after them is also illusion; which pretty much covers everything that embodies beings recognize as reality: all matter all experience.

But this life is no illusion. If matter and experience were mere illusion, then we could not use it to see past the limitations. Illusion cannot be used to reach reality, but reality can be used to see a deeper reality if we learn how to use it.

Our bodies are matter: finely tuned instruments with a handful of limited senses and limited ways of taking action in the world. And somewhere inside of our bodies is a mind with various ways of computing all the information coming and going.

The spiritual path begins when we begin to notice some difference between what is happening on a physical emotional plane and the one watching it all unfold. And though we might complain and discredit those whose views and ways of life are different from our own (whether spiritual or material life, structured or chaotic), it’s these essential differences of human nature that prod us to look beyond the differences.

Just as great suffering so often becomes a great blessing by inclining a person towards spiritual path, so too does the constant bickering amongst people and within minds allow for the blessing of discovering the inner witness. As the ‘witness’ we can easily recognize non-difference though we are forced to live in the world of bountiful difference.

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Note for those who asked, how is this related with Tantra?

This article takes Tantric perspective in that Tantra (Kashmiri Shaivism) is a realist philosophy. Maya (the limiting factor) is real and not illusury. God consciousness permeates maya as much as everything else. Tantra teaches us how to use maya as away of overcoming maya. This is said to only be possible because, as Mark Dyzkowski so beautifully put it in his exposition on the Aphorisms of Shiva, everything “participates equally in the unity of the hearts essence.”