Non-Dualism in Tantra:

The Antidote to the Ignorant Illusion of the Separate self

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते ।

पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥

ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

Auṃ pūrṇamadaḥ pūrṇamidam pūrṇātpūrnamudacyate |

Pūrṇasya pūrṇamādāya pūrṇamevāvaśiṣyate ||

auṃ śantiḥ śantiḥ śantiḥ ||

Om, that outer world is purna (full with Divine Consciousness/Whole), This inner world is also purna, from purna, purna is manifested, taking purna from purna, still purna remains.

…

This whole existence arises from that which is Whole. If the whole is removed from the whole, still, the whole remains. (Divine consciousness is infinite and non-dual.)

To begin our exploration of non-dualism in Tantra, let us open with the seed syllable of all creative expression, our familiar friend ॐ. As with much in the world today of seven billion human minds spinning their various wheels and coursing their 72,000 channel winds in a bizantine mixture of diversity, chaos, and unimaginable creativity, there are many definitions for this mystery school symbol we find now casually slapped on t-shirts, coffee cups, and bumper stickers. Blessings to all the interpretations of the word, and, here I offer the interpretation I find most eloquent and meaningful to till the soil of our non-dual contemplation.

ॐ, is formed by the three syllables a-u-ṃ ( the ṃ being pronounced a little like a nasal ‘m’ which reverberates off in a kind of implied ripple echo of the infinite). A, represents Śiva, the principle of absolute consciousness, awareness itself, unhindered and unsurpassable. U, represents Śakti, the principal of divine consciousness’ power to manifest and express, the boundless beheld bliss of Śiva. Ṃ, represents , nara, or humankind, the ever expanding limitless manifestations of the multitudes, the multiverse in its complexity, infinity, and awesome diversity. Together, these three principles of reality, the nature of all creative life, illuminate the essence of the path of Tantra, of all of manifestation as none other than the ecstatic bliss resonance of the Light of Consciousness embracing itself in immortal union with its own innate power to express and manifest infinite elaborations of its free and blissful nature to Love.

The syllables are uttered in a fluid sound resonance to remind the mind of the way it is. The word itself a map for the mind of all humankind to trace it’s way home to the heart of all the threads in the infinite web of time and space expressions, to the expressor, and the expressed, celebrating their intrinsic nature to Love life so perfectly and completely that they pulse their bliss forth in an unimpeded stream of orgasmic union. The sound is a symbol for the understanding and insight that all that can be known, is dependently arising in unison with the knower, and the process of knowing, and that the cause of our attachments, hatreds, and confusions, in other words, the cause of all humankind’s suffering is nothing but the ignorance to this principle. Hari auṃ!

This poetic pouring forth of Consciousness becoming can be summarized as the One, becomes the two, becomes the many. Wherein, upon contemplation we can realize that there is no possibility of One existing without an implied two. And once the two is implied, he too, requires two more to take notice, and on and on like this until here we are, you and I communing over words to return our fathoming towards the recognition of all this as a continuum of ॐ. Let us stretch this out so it’s thin enough to see clearly through any doubts.

Try to imagine One. Can you see it somewhere? Can you sense it somehow? Taste it? Smell it? Hear it? Touch it? If you can, then you’re there too, and there isn’t One anymore, but two. If you can’t, then where does it exist, and who is taking notice? If I write it down, if I speak it, even in the silence of my own mind, I am still there, this self my parents named, this self I normally see, is here, or there, contemplating this One, which is an impossibility without his consort, the dynamic two-lipped goddess ready to kiss consciousness into bliss in every moment.

If this One notices itself, as the sages say it does, then that noticing too becomes a sense of two, wherein the Oneness is both split into parts, the beholder and the beheld, and is held inseparable by the process of beholding. This is the essence of the teachings of Tantra. There is nothing in this world, or the countless unfathomable fractals of worlds within worlds, which can exist outside this relational field of the one, becoming the two, becoming the many, held together in the inseparability of the creative principle. This is the essence of the non-dual teachings of Tantra.

Advaita, the Sanskrit word we translate as non-duality, means not-two. Meaning, two separate existent realities is an impossibility. The teachings of Tantra illuminate that there is no way for anything to exist, as separate non related entities. Two can only become in relation to One, and the Many, and never without that relativity. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, imagine, consider, dream, and create is an interdependent field of co-emergent phenomenon. This is the Oneness, the fullness, the Wholeness, the Suchness, the Beingness, the Bliss, and the Emptiness the sages, gurus, buddhas, and mystics have been describing since beginningless time as the complete remedy for all human suffering, the antidote for hell, and the gateway to heaven. Here on earth, and in every other possible dimension of the knower knowing the known. Concentric circles, the flower of life, limitless variations of the same essential essence exploring herself in Bliss.

Here it is important to consider the other option offered up by the so-called modernists, the atheistic scientists unconsciously run by the banks and capitalist interest agendas giving everything they’ve got to create a thirsty population of consumers who believe their actions are meaningless. This secular society of armchair philosophers, drinking scotch and whatever else they do in their Harvard elite whitewashed think tanks postulate an opposition to the timeless wisdom of Wholeness worth rebutting lest we remain brainwashed by the socio normative narrative that we will die and go to… Nothing.

I know, it’s a dry subject, the complete absence of anything. There’s not much of a segway into this subject, since even approaching it would imply it was something, and therefore we’d be quite off the mark right from the get go. Modern science offers us the suggestion that there is a kind of vacuous voidness that must be something like a kind of deep dreamless sleep where we will end up once we disincarnate in these flesh machines. It seems important to point out the complete impossibility of this notion so as to massage and marinate the mind in the view of non-dual awareness, of the principle of Wholeness, as the only realistic option.

Perhaps I sound like a fanatic, but it is simply my impassioned care for the wellbeing and prosperity, the freedom and liberation for all living beings, that I bother to care to take the time to elucidate what has already been elucidated, but through my own words. It’s for the benefit of all, my little self construct included, and they say the one speaking the teachings receives immeasurable merit, which could make me selfish, if the self, wasn’t the All, and thus you, too. So let us enjoy the fire of passionate rapture for suchness, and continue to chop the head off of Nothing.

If there is some vacuous black hole of nothingness, there can be no way of knowing it, no way of proving it, and absolutely no way of being in it. The very notion of something noticing nothing, annihilates the nothingness, for there is an observer of its nothingness, which means there is a thing, a consciousness. We can be sure that no one will ever die, go into nothingness, and then communicate somehow to those of us here alive and awake in the infinite multiverse, that they have indeed reached nothingness. It’s a complete impossibility. And this impossibility lends the implication of cyclical existence, of the principle of change, and ultimately reincarnation.

Accepting and embracing the notion of reincarnation, that consciousness continuously integrates itself into changing forms of its essential nature of beingness, is key to the recognition of the non-dual mind. Key, because when we begin to see the inseparable continuum nature of reality, we can dismantle the conditioned view of seeing ourselves as separate entities, with personal agendas, benefiting from the world to propel that same separate self forwards, often at the expense of others. In the space created through the shedding of that conditioned response, we can weave in the view of everything as one continuous whole, expanding and contracting in a wave-like pulse of interdimensional splendour.

In linking our awareness to this Light of Consciousness we open ourselves up to experience the inherent bliss that very Consciousness, which is our own true nature, is experiencing all the time, right behind the smoke of our ignorance to its existence. This process of clearing the smoke from the mirror of our nature, is the path of awakening. And awakening is the path to non-dual experience. Non-dual experience is seeing oneself as none other than that thatness which lends the entirety of worldly and otherworldly experience.

In the Tantrik traditions the iconography of Śiva and Śakti, consciousness and manifesting power, is used to imprint the mind with this principle of non-dual bliss perfection. When these two qualities of the Divine, divine meaning the Light of Consciousness uncontracted by conceptualizations, are depicted together in sexual union, the notion of their inseperability is underscored. This union of Consciousness and its power of Manifestation, of Śiva with his Śakti is referred to as ‘the Brahman’. Not to be confused with the creator god ‘Brahma’, ‘the Brahman’ is the indescribable, unfathomable true essence of the union of Śiva and Śakti, of Consciousness in blissful creation. The Brahman is perhaps the ultimate non-dual symbology within the Tantrik framework, and is never depicted as having a form or emanation body, as it is the essentially indescribable pure essence nature, beyond words, thoughts, and elaborations.

Allowing this non-dual nature of the ultimate reality to flow into this humankind reality, the field of nara, we can engage with it intimately through our visceral corporeal expressions. In Tantra, keeping with this view of Wholeness, the expression of the sense-perceiving limited beings is considered not a hindrance whatsoever to the Divine, but rather, a blissful celebration. Our human bodies of enjoyment are seen as the fingers emerging from the field continuum of Divine bliss, as nothing but its own free will nature to enjoy, play and express the multitudes of its creative nature. The cause of our experiencing of the world as suffering is simply due to our contracted understanding, the absence of clear seeing, called avidya.

In this way, the sexual expression of the human man and woman, imbued with the wisdom of clear seeing, vidya, and the Light of Consciousness, prakāśa, becomes the mirrored play of that Divine union. In Tantra, all of the cosmos, is this ecstatic blissful union of Śiva and Śakti, and through insight and practice one’s human experience becomes the incarnate expression of that very bliss nature. The sexual art becomes a ritual enactment of the One, becoming the two, becoming the many, while remaining continuously and essentially non-dual, or Whole. This culminates at the moment of conception, wherein Consciousness merges with the Power of Manifestation to create a whole new being, the baby, a symbol of all humankind.

Let us take a moment to imagine a world wherein all life brought into being was done in the sacred space of Wisdom of these teachings. We can imagine the kinds of beings that would be born to this world we call home if the parents conceiving of them were connected in ecstatic union in recognition of their Divine nature, linking their beings simultaneously in wave-like pulsations of valley undulations of orgasmic bliss.

We need not only imagine, as there are accounts of such beings conceived in nectarian recognition, and these beings are the lineage gurus that bring us these words. One such guide on the path of Tantra is the venerable Abhinavagupta, whom we can sip from his teachings with our straws of diamond light, letting our minds drink in the bliss of his realizations.

In this, the first verse of Abhinavagupta’s Tantrasāra, the essence of Tantra, here translated by Christopher Wallis, we can imagine ourselves fathoming a culture and context wherein realized beings made love and created further realized beings, and perhaps by such imagining, bring again such bliss realms into our perception. This verse has two distinct readings, differing meanings, which alludes to the multiple readings of life, and the layers of understanding. Let us start with the Sanskrit, to enjoy the exotic and evocative soundscape of the original language of these teachings.

vimala-kalāśrayābhinava-sṛṣṭi-mahā jananī

bharita-tanuś ca pañca-mukha-gupta-rucir janakaḥ |

tad-ubhaya-yāmala-sphurita-bhāva-visarga-mayaṃ

hṛdayam anuttarāmṛta-kulaṃ mama saṃsphuratāt || 1 ||

Ahhh… to be transported by sounds so new and foreign to a culture and context diverse to our own. Now, with the grace and generosity of Wallis’ translations, we can look into two of the readings of this verse which invite us into the both ultimate and relative views which are the essence of Tantra. The first reading is as follows: “The Mother is She who is the ground of all pure action, radiant with ever-new genesis. The Father is He who is filled (with all the śaktis), maintaining his Light through his five faces. May my Heart, one with the diverse creation flowing forth from the fusion of these two, embodying the nectar of the Absolute, shine forth!”

Here we are invited to appreciate that all of creation is the dance between the cosmic “mother” and “father”, the ground of action, manifesting power eternally generating infinite realities, and the Light of Consciousness continuously performing the five acts of creation, concealment, maintenance, destruction and grace, referred to here as the five faces. These cosmic parents in fusion provide the nectar of the fundamental nature of all reality, and we are guided to imbue our hearts with the recognition of their inseparability.

The second reading brings us into the relatively real realm of Abhinavagupta’s incarnated reality, his living being parents as the expression of the cosmic parents willing all things into being. “My mother Vimalā is she for whom the birth of Abhinava was a festival of joy; my father is renowned as Siṃhagupta, full (of the state of Śiva). May my heart, formed from the emissions of the ecstatic state of their union, embodying the nectar of the Absolute, shine forth (through this work)!” Here we learn that this opening verse is both an homage to the eternal mother and father, and Abhinavagupta’s own blood and bone, sperm and egg parents, whom having themselves realized the essence of the non-dual teachings conceived of his heart in their ecstatic union. Their conception of him was an earthly expression of that ultimate cosmic union of Śiva-Śakti.

Though all of life is at its essential nature this blissful union’s generative dream, without recognizing it as such in the mind’s layering states of the conscious-unconscious spectrum, the sense of it as such will be absent. This absence of understanding, the avidya-ajñana state, is considered the poisonous cause of bondage in Tantra. It is only through marinating the mind pervasively in Self-recognition, remembering of one’s essential nature as none other than the blissful expression of the limitless Divine, that we liberate ourselves from the contractive state.

This is where contemplative meditation upon the illusion of the limited self’s true existence is integral on the path of awakening. We must devote our mental faculties to the pursuit of looking for a fixed, self-existent, inherent self which exists separate from the Whole, and upon realizing we cannot find such a self, embrace its emptiness. When we deeply contemplate that there is no independent self, we can naturally appreciate the nature of Emptiness, of dependent origination, wherein all actions of subject-object relations are just that, implicitly relational. This relative nature of existence is the Wholeness that Tantra invites us into union with, and proposes as the fundamental non-dual state. I am neither this, nor that, I am all of it. I am a woven network of relational phenomena, and it is only the sense of my contracted loci of awareness that convinces me of the illusion of separateness.

In Buddhist Tantra, this revelation is languaged as the inseparable union of non-dual bliss and emptiness. Here the recognition is that when one abides in the direct experience of emptiness, the natural and completely unavoidable effect is great bliss. This is why when the Buddha Shakyamuni realized emptiness, and saw the source of all suffering directly, he is said to have laughed. The moment we completely dissolve the illusion of a separate self, all suffering is seen through, like the clear light of the void, and all that remains is the joyful bliss of enlightenment.

Here we can take a moment to consider the impact of language, of the power of the word, as we embark on the journey of liberating the essential nature of reality from the bondage of dualistic, separate self conception. In Tantra, the word is seen as an integral and powerful way in which consciousness fathoms itself. Words by their very nature are of course dualistic, lending immediately to a subject-object axis. No word could ever actually and accurately be non-dual, however they can describe the nature of non-duality and thus serve to direct our awareness to the meditation upon it.

In Tantra common words are considered mental constructs, Vikalpas in Sanskrit. All mental constructs create the story, or script, of our personal plays, the movie of our lives. In the aim of directing our movie towards liberation from the bondage of ignorance and an inaccurate view of reality, the Tantrik teachings advise us to consciously write the scripts we narrate to ourselves. The understanding is that if we are experiencing the world as a separate existent reality, and ourselves a separate self, we are narrating a subconscious script of dualistic perspective and our experience is playing out the prepared roles. If we are experiencing suffering, we can infer that there are such scripts playing out in our subconscious, or even conscious, mind, and that the remedy is not to try to adjust the circumstances we falsely perceive as the cause of our suffering, but rather to adjust the script that is writing the circumstance into being. As all suffering is caused by ignorance, unskillful and confused vision of reality, the cure for suffering is knowledge, wisdom, and skilfull tuning of our vision of reality towards non-dual realization.

The heart of yogic practice from a Tantrik perspective is always this process of re-conditioning the mind towards recognition of non-dual insight, through meditation. I will quote Christopher Wallis again here, who validates this point when he states “The underlying theory here is as follows: any concept, narrative, or mental frame that is constantly repeated will eventually become so internalized that it becomes the non-conceptual terms of one’s moment-to-moment experience.” This non-conceptual stream of one’s moment-to-moment experience is our day-to-day humdrum reality, our personal video dream. The yogi aspires to alter their experience of normal perception to a stream of clear abiding in non-dual essence. This constitutes liberation in this tradition, complete freedom from believing the veils of māyā’s appearances of separate realities, and continual repose in clear seeing through to the light of consciousness’ true nature.

In this view, everything is the Brahman, eternally free and of free nature. The mantra “sat chit ānanda rupaṃ ahaṃ nitya mukta svabhāvavān”, translated as “I am the form of being, consciousness, and bliss, eternally free, of free nature” reminds us that the same qualities of the Divine, which we often mentally externalize as some “higher” power that exists separate of ourselves, in fact are the same qualities of our own personal dream, our own personal beings, the Divine ‘as us’. Only the veiling of this nature by the power of the goddess of concealment, māya devī, blocks our ability to know that state. And in this tradition, even she, this goddess of veils, is a goddess power, a shakti, who of the Divine’s free will acts out her veiling magic. In a sense, even the confusion is the Divine’s will. How all the buddhas, devas, gurus and yiddams laugh in a chorus of Ha’s that ripple out into infinite bliss waves of nectarian ambrosia in such recognition. May we join them!

There is a perhaps obvious paradox which emerges when we consider that the Divine both veils its nature to itself, and longs for its remembrance. We might ask both how and why an omniscient force would obscure its self-recognition, and simultaneously desire abiding in it. If the Divine has willed the confusion, why would we need to direct our efforts towards awakening? Further, wouldn’t we be using the very contracted awareness we are trying to free ourselves from, to pursue the knowledge and wisdom of the traditional teachings, towards that aim of liberation? We could ask, if the Divine ties herself up into bondage, why should we try to liberate her? Once more I will quote Christopher Wallis’ commentary on the Tantrasāra to flesh out this paradox, and offer a solution.

He says, in predicting the reader’s mind “Here the reader familiar with Tantrik philosophy might raise an objection. “In this tradition, isn’t everything, including contracted awareness, a manifestation of the divine?” Yes indeed, we respond, yet here we are confronted by a central paradox: it’s impossible to realize the truth of the latter teaching until we have thoroughly realized the truth of the former one. Only when one realizes and has the capacity to abide in expanded awareness—free of story, free of belief, free of selfhood, free of imagined significance, and free of the need for anything not already provided—can one then perceive that every contracted state is nothing but a contraction of that very same unbounded beingness that one experiences in the expanded state. In other words, only having known one’s divine essence-nature can one see and know that every kind of experience whatsoever is that same divinity in another form. You cannot skip a step in this process, and those who try end up confused, if not deluded. For this reason, first and foremost the Divine is and must be defined as the Light of Consciousness, uncontracted by conceptualization.”

Flexibility of the mind is required to appreciate that in order to truly abide in the genuine recognition of wholeness and its inherent bliss nature we must first train the mind to recognize it. Rushing towards labeling your felt contractions as bliss states before the mind is ripe to actually sensing the truth of that state’s omniscient existence, can lead to a kind of by-passing forceful approach which ends up confusing the mental faculties. Instead, we are encouraged to be intimately honest with the state of our minds veiled, or unveiled quality of perception, and to continuously orient our mind towards clear seeing. We use the faculties of the contracted mind to till the soil of our conditioned consciousness towards becoming a hospitable and natural habitat for the clarity and purity of Divine consciousness to emerge. We use effort, to culture effortlessness. We are gentle, yet firm, honest, yet creative in the process of continuously orienting our awareness towards insight. Not getting stuck in the muck of our confusion, confusing it as somehow “really real”, we remain limbre in mind and purify the doubts of our confused states of contraction with wisdom.

In preliminary Tantrik practice, we have to use the intellect to re-program, to flood the neural network with insight, until the pervasiveness of insight is so strong and continuous that all contracted awareness ceases. At that stage, we can drop the conceptions, and simply abide in the mind of awakening, becoming Buddhas ‘awakened ones’ or ‘jīvān-mukti’, free beings. Along the stages of the path, the intellect is seen as a tool for awakening, among the other yogic limbs prescribed to this aim.

It is noteworthy to mention the tradition’s teaching that fundamentally the only way we can truly fully awaken, become fully realized beings, is through what is called ‘anugraha’ and is loosely translated as grace in English. Anugraha, one of the five powers of divine consciousness we referenced earlier (creation, maintenance, annihilation, concealment, and grace/blessing), is the quality of the Divine that offers the peeling back of its own veils. I like to think of it as the Divine’s power to wink at iself, as though being both the joke, the joker and the butt of the joke.

We could think of this as a kind of fatalistic determinism if we’re not careful to hold to the tradition’s perhaps paradoxical imagery and language. Here the Divine is not to be considered a kind of Godhead entity, sitting somewhere outside of ourselves and bestowing its powers upon us. No, no, no, let us nip that conditioned view from the root lest in bud a dismal garden where paradise might flower. This powerful Divine Consciousness is not an entity, a separate self-existing phenomenon that somehow exists outside the nature of the cosmos as the interdependent web of the Whole. This is why the Brahman is never depicted in an image. Rather, all the Divinites, the gods and goddesses are offered to illustrate the many infinite qualities of the divine, to inspire and evoke within the mind those qualities by evocative and poetic means . The ultimate Divine nature has no fixed shape, is undefinable, only its qualities are depicted so as to paint the mind with guideposts towards its nature. In this way, Anugraha, this quality of Divine grace, is not like a blessing that a king bestows on a mortal whom he is ‘pleased’ with as some kind of reward. Likewise the possible absence of grace in one’s life is not a kind of monarchistic punishment by a judgemental Godhead. Anugraha, this Divine Grace of seeing through to the nature of reality is a blessing one ripens into through the fundamental laws of Karma. It is completely within our power to culture the conditions to experience that graceful nature.

This is where some basic understanding of karmic conditioning is important to understand as we approach the path of generating the mind of non-dual realization. We can infer the nature of our past actions by looking honestly and compassionately at our current situation. If we find ourselves in difficulty and challenge, we can compassionately appreciate that we have been causing difficulty and are thus finding our awareness abiding in a realm of difficulty. If we wish to change this state, to orient towards experiencing the grace required to achieve actual realization of non-duality, we can begin to change the way we take actions, both inner in our minds, and outer in the world of forms and apparent others. We can meditate. Here this word is used to mean focus our minds, on the appreciation of all apparent others as none other than our own true self nature, and begin to practice kind and skillful actions towards them. All living beings become the Deity of Anugraha, of Grace, and we imagine we are serving them to benefit the Whole. In so doing, gradually, we will plant, water, and ripen new Karmic seed-realities, and eventually develop the causes to abide in the blessing energy of Divine grace.

The culture of Tantra, one rich with devotion, offerings, rituals, song, dance, and story understood this karmic law, and sought to provide a context wherein the blessings of awakening could naturally flourish. Surely there were some mistakes made, the most obvious one being the caste system and a pervasive violence coming from a systemic ignorance, so it is not perhaps accurate to pedestalize the historical culture of Tantra. Yet, we can look to the wisdom teachings of the culture for insight into how to orient our actions towards becoming causes for more and more purity and clarity in our path to awakening. This is the way we become not passive recipients of our ‘fate’, but active karmic artists designing the conditions for our destined enlightenment. We can learn to draw upon all the potentialities, all the beauty and the enchantment of our senses, and direct these objects of focus towards the meditation upon the mind of awakening. We can turn everything, even our attachments, into the path, by infusing all our actions with the energy of recognition.

So then, how does a modern yoga practice, the āsana postural practice we find so prominently growing in our cultural context fit into this path of skilful design of paradise realms of non-dual bliss and emptiness? And are we even aware that it could be nothing short of means upon such profound aims? The eight limbs of Patanjali’s yoga system, the popular skeleton for much of modern yoga approaches, all serve as powerful means for liberation when understood from this contextual framework. Āsana for example, is an efficient way of cultivating one’s energy towards the field of awakening, so long as one’s practice is rooted in the recognition of its purpose as such. This is where the emphasis on the mental contemplative focus meditation is so key. One could mechanically perform a series of postures, set to a musical cacophony of messages, and forget to hold the intention for the clear mind of awakening. One’s practice would then have very little to do with the actual motivations of yoga, and rather be much more of a physical fitness regime wherein one quite possibly might be strengthening the forces of dualistic thinking and the view of separation.

On the other hand, perhaps the one holding a gentle mudra of focus and compassion, remembering oneself as the limitless divine, one could practice the same series of postures, even set to the same arrangement of music, whilst holding the view of non-dual reality and the intention for the movements to be a living embodied prayer, a moving meditation upon this principle, wherein at every moment that the mind wanders from this object of focus, the non-dual state, one encourages it back towards focus. The practice would appear similar from an outside observer, but the meaning and power of the inner field reached would be completely different.

The various other limbs of yoga, yama (abstinences), niyama (observances), pranayama (breath control), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation) and samadhi (absorption) are all ways of generating the field of awakening and creating the conditions to abide within that state. By observing and abstaining from certain skillful and unskillful actions (karmas) one ensures that they are planting the causes for realization rather than further causes for more and more ignorance. By practicing pranayama one cultivates the primary channels, the Ida, Pingala, and Suṣumṇa channels to flow awakening energy through the body-mind and free the awareness of the sense of contraction and dualistic perception.

The very nature of this primary trinity of energy channels, the focus of much of the yogic practices, is the dance between the observer, the observed, the process of observation, and ultimately the appreciation and realization of all these as one inseparable weave. This is where we can really begin to grock the depth of non-dual awareness within the yogic tradition, of just how central to the aim of yoga abiding in this perspective of the ultimate perfection of bliss and emptiness, is to the practice. The Pingala and Ida channels, or nadī in Sanskrit, run along the left and right sides of the central channel, the Suṣumṇa, which runs directly central between the left and right sides of the body, and a little in front of the spine. These two side channels are respectively responsible for the conception of a subjective holder, and the object held. They are the source, so-to-speak, of the sense of separation between these two relational realities, the subject-object axis, much like the Śiva-Śakti paradigm.

One of the primary aims of a complete yogic practice is to gather the energy from the bodies vast network of river energy channels, with a great mass of that energy being in the left and right side channels, into the central channel, wherein abiding there the sense of separation dissolves and the mirror is cleared of the smoke of mistaken appearances. Much as we contemplate the ecstatic union of Consciousness and its Power to Manifest, the blissful embrace of Śiva and his Śakti, resting always as nothing other than the clear light of Consciousness, the indescribable Brahman, we can similarly contemplate the Ida and Pingala channels merging in the central suṣumṇa. As the subjective holder and the object held, the sense of being both the observed phenomenon, and the observer, merge into the pervasive sense of both subject and object becoming One, we are abiding in the recognition of the central channel’s wisdom of non-dual bliss and emptiness.

The many ways we move the body through postures, refine the breath and subtle energy through pranayama, observe and abstain from virtuous and non-virtuous actions, withdraw our senses from the illusion that objects are separate from ourselves, concentrate upon the central aim of our practice, contemplate the reality we wish to see (our ecstatic blissful non-dual paradise), and absorb our minds within the field of such ambrosia, are all ways we massage the subtle mind with self-recognition. Simultaneously we massage out all the kinks and false views, the confusions, attachments and ignorances that keep us bound in a warped sense of separatism, competing towards some finite personal peace or prosperity. In this balancing act of inviting in, and clearing out, we gradually generate the strengthened field of merit required to abide eternally in that orgiastic bliss of everything in the known and unknown worlds celebrating its intrinsic union in an infinite wave of oceanic unfathomable Love.

This is where our practice can take us, when brought into the Light of Consciousness. Upon marinating the mind sufficiently in such recognition, the mantra becomes alive in our minds, and shapes the very manifestation our mind generates. We uncover the pure land that is always there, waiting right behind the veils of ignorant views and contracted loci of awareness, playing hide and seek with herself, for the bliss of it.

The mantra, ‘sat chit ānanda rupaṃ ahaṃ nitya mukta svabhāvavān’, ‘ I am the form of being, consciousness, and bliss, eternally free and of free nature’, is felt on all levels of one’s being in a kind of impermeable fabric of clear light recognition. One awakens to the nature of things, of the essence, of the essence, of the essence, of your essence, and the buddha in you laughs joyously ‘Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho!’ Time swallows himself whole, and the linear wave-like nature of the particle of the Whole remembers herself as the expansive continuum of none other than It. Which isn’t ‘It’, of course, for speaking of It is an impossibility. And it also is ‘It’, for it is Everything.

Let us close with a passage of scripture, to remind the skeptical mind that these are not my original ideas, but rather my gentle and exuberant homage to the lineage gurus, the source of all attainments. In the Spanda-Kārikās, a text describing the Divine Creative pulsation, the heartbeat of Śiva, our journey as yogis and yoginis I have done my best to elucidate, is described beautifully in the following words.

“ A spark of the Divine flame descends into matter and forgets its divine origin. Like an exile it wanders into distant lands and in different forms. At the human stage, it acquires the gift of speech and mentation. It has now reached a definite station in the evolutionary march. The human being as now knows sows his wild oats, reaps the consequences and learns the inexorable laws of life in the bitter school of experience. A time comes when he is filled with nostalgia, and now begins his journey homeward. He has not to go far. He has only to throw off the mask of the pseudo-I and enter his essential, real I, which is the Spanda, the heart-beat of Siva. He now becomes what he always was. The universe is no longer a foreign land. The I and the This, the Subject and the object become one. That is an experience for which there is no word in the human language.”

As you find yourself listening to these words, or reading them with your light refracting eyes, you likely find yourself somewhere upon this journey home. Home to the heartbeat of Śiva, and the recognition of all past, present and future realities as none other than that same sacred space of Love. May these words serve as further marination for your mind of pure light, and remind you of your nature as eternally free. We continuously wink at each other as we embark on our journey homewards, helping each other out along the path with nudges of insight and gentle pats along the way.

May we dedicate the merit of these words towards that profound and perfect awakening for ourselves and all beings. Really feel that dedication, deep in your heart, the way you might imagine it for your dying beloved incarnate on their death pire as you send them off with your prayers. Really allow the spirit of awakening, the mind of enlightenment for all beings, to permeate your mental continuum and ripple out like waves of blissful devotion to all those who thirst for happiness, just as you thirst for happiness. The only true satitiation is in awakening. Let us drink from this, the ocean of immortality!