Hi, this is Shambhavi.
Welcome to my weekly podcast about spirituality, love, death, devotion and waking up while living in a messy world.
The Satsang with Shambhavi podcast is recorded live each week with students of our non-profit community, Jaya Kula.
For more information and to find out about attending a satsang, visit jayakula.org.
Thanks for listening.
Much love to you wherever and however you are.
STUDENT: Hi, I wanted to ask about fragmented self.
Stephen mentioned that phrase and I was like, wondering about how Shiva nature is the big Self and then we feel fragmented.
Why did you use the word fragmented self that day?
I wanted to know.
SHAMBHAVI: The fragmented self that I made reference to in the poem we were reading about a hand separated from the body.
The hand is what grasps, it's what grabs.
So I think that's what the Rumi poem was referring to.
So I was saying that when we feel that we're separate beings, we always have this sense of fragmentation.
We're trying to create a sense of self out of a bunch of constructs and concepts, received ideas from our cultures.
We have different ways that our desire expresses itself.
Basically, fragmented means that we're still experiencing anavamala.
Anavamala is a Trika term, as you know, that means a feeling of separation.
And we can contrast anavamala with samavesha.
Samavesha means a feeling of immersion and continuity.
When we're still experiencing separation, what does that mean?
It means that we are still perceiving in a real way that we are separate bodies in space.
And when we're experiencing samavesha,
it means that we are actually perceiving that we are continuous with a whole.
That sense of partness doesn't really exist.
Once we are feeling more immersed and continuous, there's a whole lot of work we're not doing.
All the work to create this sense of self. Internal conversations and decisions and all that kind of stuff.
We're simply not doing that work anymore and there's a sense of profound relaxation.
Once you experience that, the thought of going back to that work? Ugh. It's like, ugh, no.
I couldn't even do it if I tried.
The thing is that when you have this encounter with the natural state, with that continuity, that great continuity,
it is completely non-different from this kind of devotion and sweetness and
delight and enjoyment and this intelligence that is not captured by anything that we know of.
When we're experiencing samavesha, we're not just experiencing some mechanical sense of continuity between ourselves and other people.
There's no such thing.
It's not just like, oh, I'm looking into space and I don't feel any difference from you.
If that's all it were, okay, that would be kind of nice, I guess.
But that is so, so minuscule compared to what we actually experience, which is being immersed in this Self that's just
full of all these qualities. Just like we are, right?
But completely unbound and in their most pizzazzy, pristine form.
I mean, there's just a sense of brilliance about everything, right?
That is so magnetizing.
That's why I think once we have contact with that, as Ma said, it's that which we discover and then which causes us to not
want to discover anything else ever again.
It's just so magnetizing that everything else just kind of becomes meh [laughs], like bothering to construct a self in any way.
Other than playfully.
I think there is a sense of cosplay going on on a cosmic scale, but it's not taken very seriously.
Constructing a self is really exhausting.
It's something that we spend a lot of time doing.
And I think even if we're engaged in it a lot, our body, energy, and mind still somewhere knows how exhausting it is.
On many levels, we express that we want to be relieved of the burden of the self, the burden of this individual self, I mean.
And we express it when we numb out. Numbing out is a way of being relieved of the burden of the self.
We express it when we become addicted to substances.
That's a way of being relieved of the burden of the self.
We express it when we try to find refuge in romantic love and a sense of merging with one other person.
Even in a more micro way, people who are always looking for other people who are the same as them.
Sometimes when people try to befriend me, they said, oh, we're so alike.
I think you and I are so alike.
And that's an expression of wanting to be relieved of the burden of the separate self.
So if you're already relieved of the burden of the separate self, you don't really need to be around only people that are like you. [laughs] Turns out.
Then when we do spiritual practice, we want to become, you know, one of the phrases that's used in Trika is God-intoxicated.
There's a direct relationship between spiritual intoxication and literal intoxication, the motivations for them.
This is just something I've talked about a lot.
I mean, I grew up in a family of addicts, so it's something I've been contemplating a lot in my life.
And I got invited a really long time ago when I was living in San Francisco to give a talk at a Zen center about addiction.
That set me off on this course of thinking about how the impulses for addiction and for spiritual life, they have a lot of similarities.
And then of course, we're doing spiritual practice and we also have that yearning to be more engaged, more integrated, less separate.
So these are all expressions on a micro level.
The only difference between all the stuff we do to numb out and forget ourselves and all the stuff we do to wake up and be relieved of that burden
of individuality or separateness.
The only difference is one leads to freshness of mind and more skill and more intimacy and a better life.
And the other leads to the opposite of that.
But we all want the same thing.
We're just expressing it different ways.
And this is the teaching that I've been giving since I ever taught anything, which is that there's only one desire in all of existence.
All desire, regardless of what the object of desire is, all desire is expressing the same thing and pretty much feels the same way.
But it's the object of desire that changes as we wake up more.
And then finally, what is desire?
So all those desires, even the desire for realization or spiritual life, even those desires have objects.
They're directed towards something.
But Lord Shiva's desire, the desire of this reality, is objectless.
It's simply this desire to express, like a natural desire for self-expression.
And that's where we end up with all the playfulness because that desire is just expressing itself freely in all these
different forms in a playful way.
STUDENT: I've been getting it reflected back to me that some of my obscurations have been amplified recently to a point that they
have become very clear.
That has helped me develop and work on them more clearly.
And if you could talk about this process that it gets a little bit worse when it starts getting better.
SHAMBHAVI: There's many, many ways that that can happen, not just one way.
But if we're not aware of something at all, or we're only partially aware of it, or we're only intermittently aware of it,
and then we become more aware of it, of course it feels more intense.
Maybe we become more consistently aware of some habit pattern that we have.
Maybe we stop forgetting it.
You ever have somebody in your life, or maybe you are that person who constantly is having the same realization over and over again,
like every two years they have the same realization.
Our karmas are kind of like floating ice flows.
They kind of go back under and then they come up again.
But if something appears and remains, then you have this experience.
Oh, I'm experiencing this more.
It was always the same.
It's just you didn't have as much awareness of it before.
Doing daily spiritual practice will make that happen.
Right now, what we have on earth is all of the most entrenched patterns in our lives being mirrored
to us in these grotesque ways that you have to be in some really weird condition not to see because they're writ so large. So many more people are
seeing and if we're being good practitioners we're
not just running around proclaiming how outraged we are or how upset we are at other people.
We are also looking in the mirror and finding how aspects of our own self are reflected in these grotesque behaviors.
Maybe we're not being as grotesque.
I mean, I don't think anyone here is being as grotesque as Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu. But there are aspects of them that are part of our
cultures and part of how we're groomed and trained
to be and we can look in that mirror and then it's like, uh-oh, I see something of them in myself.
That's how we should be using these events in addition to all the other ways that we're interacting with them.
I don't know if that's what you were referring to, but that's just another way.
I've just always learned from negative examples.
And when we come into more spiritual maturity or just maturity as a person, that's something we can do.
Instead of running from every negative example or trying to define it as something completely separate from us,
we can have the courage and the clarity to see how we might be connected to it somehow and learn more about ourselves and work with that.
So yeah, this is absolutely an unavoidable part of coming into more awareness and maturity.
STUDENT: I would love to hear you talk more about learning from negative examples.
And we hear some examples of how you've done that.
SHAMBHAVI: I grew up with some negative examples and felt something in myself responding to that.
It wasn't really an intellectual process.
But one thing I was mentioning to somebody the other day is that my parents socialized.
They went to parties and had friends and stuff.
But they never invited anyone over.
When they socialized, they always went to somebody else's house.
That was a negative example to me growing up.
I didn't want to have a house like that.
And so I made a conscious determination.
When I have my own place to live, the door will be open and it's going to be open house.
Why did I think that?
Why did I not think, oh, it's really nice to go out to a party and then not have to have anyone over?
Someone might have thought that, right?
But for me, that was a negative example.
I wanted to have a house full of visitors, full of guests, and I do.
I grew up with someone who was very self-concerned.
My father was a very, very anxious person.
Not like...
expressing a lot of insecurity in an everyday way.
That wasn't how he was anxious.
There was this deep seated anxiety in him that I don't know if I could ever define.
But when you looked in his eyes, it looked like a storm.
It was very difficult for me to look directly at him.
The pain in his eyes was almost too much for me to bear when I was growing up.
And one of the things he taught me was that when you have that kind of pain, that kind of anxiety, you can't care about anybody else.
Everything in his life was wrapped up in trying to manage that somehow.
And that being said, he also laughed a lot.
You wouldn't meet him and think, oh, he's insecure.
He was very social.
I would say even gregarious.
And he was known among his friends for having a good sense of humor.
And he was creative.
So it was kind of an interesting situation.
But I was always aware of that pain and of how wrapped up in himself he was.
He was very critical of other people.
He was really anxious about us doing certain things as kids.
Like he never wanted us to take risks physically.
He was very anxious about that and just everything related to him.
I mean, he was a narcissist.
So I just determined that I did not want my life to be wrapped up in myself.
I saw what that was doing and how that made a horrible life for a person.
And caused so many problems for a person.
And I determined I didn't want my life to be like that.
I can't really explain why I was like that, but we see something that doesn't resonate with how we want to live and we just
make a decision to live differently.
That's how it's been for me anyway.
STUDENT: Did you say samavesha?
SHAMBHAVI: Yes, samavesha.
STUDENT: Samavesha?
SHAMBHAVI: Yeah.
STUDENT: And you said that's an experience of continuity.
SHAMBHAVI: It means immersion.
STUDENT: Immersion. Is that an experience that comes and goes, or is that an underlying state or constant state?
SHAMBHAVI: It is our constant condition, but we don't know it most of the time.
So we aren't creating it.
But we are able to recognize it more and more as we go along until it becomes our constant condition in a conscious way.
It's always our constant condition, just not in a conscious way all the time.
So there's a long period of time in our practice, for most people anyway, where our awareness of it does come and go a lot.
Anandamayi Ma said, coming and going, the thing will be done.
That's what she was referring to, coming and going out of greater recognition or awareness of our natural condition.
Coming and going from that, we will eventually be established in that.
STUDENT: Is that like an energetic experience or is there anything else you could say about that?
SHAMBHAVI: No, it's not just an energetic experience.
STUDENT: Is that part of it?
Is it some kind of body experience?
The reason I ask is I'm just a very body-based, full of energy type of person.
So I just was curious.
SHAMBHAVI: Well, that might be a way that you begin to experience more subtlety in your relationship to reality.
But that's not where you'll end up.
That's nothing to hold on to as a concept.
I would throw out the sentence, I am a very body-based person.
Right now, that's where you're at.
But you're also a wisdom-based person.
So we say in this tradition that we have three ways of experiencing our existence.
We have a physical body.
Almost everyone has an experience of their physical body.
We have an energy body.
And most people have at least a little experience of that, but, you know, not everyone.
And then some people have a lot of experience of that.
And then we also have what's called a wisdom body.
In this kind of tradition, particularly the Tantrik traditions from India in general, both within India and in their
reception in the West, there has been undue emphasis put on energetic experiences.
This is because we're collectors of experiences and accomplishments.
If we had to say, I'm going to become immersed in a wisdom far vaster than anything I could ever totally embody [laughs],
we're basically saying I'm not all that.
But if we can say, oh, I had this energetic experience.
My Kundalini did thus and such and blah, blah, blah.
I had these siddhis.
Then we're basically using spiritual practice to maintain our sense of separation for the greater glory of ourselves.
Really, when we start to recognize that wisdom
and energy and physical life are never separate, they're the same thing,
just experienced three different ways.
But when we start to be more in touch with that wisdom aspect, then the sense of control that we have over our lives greatly diminishes.
That's a very shorthand way of saying that, which might actually be so shorthand that I'm giving a misperception.
But we become more skillful, but we also become less of the decision makers in our lives.
And our lives become more guided by this greater wisdom.
So many people have an experience of that too.
I'm sure you do also, of being able to feel the wisdom in a circumstance or feel like you're being told to go in a certain direction or have
a spontaneous sense of something that isn't just energetic.
It's more like a communication.
All of those things are aspects of our wisdom body or what we call our wisdom body just for convenience sake.
Eventually, if you do this practice for, I don't know how long, no promises, but eventually you will feel like you're
just in an ocean of living wisdom.
Now, to me, that feels marvelous.
But when that first became more apparent to me, it was actually terrifying. [laughs]
I went to a friend of mine and I said, I feel like guru's everywhere and I don't know what to do.
I'm just so afraid I'm going to make a mistake because I feel like I'm constantly being ordered around and told what to do.
And I don't really know if I'm hearing correctly and blah, blah, blah.
But that was just a phase. That faded.
I realized that there wasn't a me in the sense I was thinking of to make a mistake.
So it didn't really matter.
In any case, yes, we should pay attention to energetic phenomena that are happening in our opening
in the way that we're unfolding spiritually as people, but we don't want to get stuck there thinking that's the be all and the end all.
So don't have a concept about it.
It's not the main event.
It is something that happens along the way and that will continue to unfold.
But the main event is the getting of wisdom and being in relationship to living wisdom. That's the main event.
I was just thinking the other day, because being in this kind of tradition, in any Tantrik tradition from India,
if you're teaching in any tradition like this, there's always students coming around who really want to have whiz, bang,
lights and whistles, energetic experiences.
And that's what they're here for.
And that's what they're aiming toward.
And I was thinking about this the other day because there's an American kundalini yoga teacher who's not alive anymore named Swami Rudranada.
He was called Rudy for short.
And he had tremendous control over energy and could create all kinds of phenomena around him.
But he was also tremendously compassionate.
If you read his writings and his teachings, you can see that compassion was much more important to him than all of these energetic
phenomenon that he was able to engage with.
When he died, there was this huge battle among a few male students who other people in that community called the shakti boys,
for good reason. Who was going to take over and be the new reigning king of subtle energy.
Of kundalini. But none of them ever talk about compassion. Like all they talk about is their engagement with energy. This is such a waste. Rudy
was actually a beautiful teacher of compassion. I didn't study with him but just reading his writings he's one of the people that taught me
what was actually important. But if we're not looking for it we don't notice I guess.
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