Shanti Path
Thursday, July 14th, 2005Asato ma sadgamaya.
From the unreal lead me to the real.Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya.
From the darkness lead me to light.Mrityorma amritam gamaya.
From death lead me to immortality.
I’ve been singing the Shanti Path daily for more than five years now.
For a long time, I tried to ignore the words of the first verse and just concentrate on the feeling. I thought the words were dualistic and transcendental. And delusional.
Yeah, yeah. Unreal and Real. Darkness and Light. Mortality and Immortality. Same old, same old. Yogi delusions of living forever. Blah, blah, blah.
Things have changed.
Now, I ask myself: What is unreal? What is real?
Unreality is any View that leaves something out, even a View that leaves out limitation.
Reality is the entire life process without exception.
What is darkness? What is light?
Darkness is separation from the experience of Reality,
just as it is.
Light is the natural luminosity of consciousness flashing forth: that which everything, including duality, fundamentally is.
What is death? What is immortality?
Death is unconsciousness.
Immortality is ultimate awakeness.
Every spiritual tradition that I know of, other than Tantra, asks you to leave something out. Tantra’s View of Reality is so large, it includes the freedom to play with the experience of limitation and delusion. Because Reality is the totality of the life process, Tantriks are ready and willing to use every aspect of life, everything that is presented to us just as it is, in order to realize this freedom. From complicated kriyas to meditating on the space of your armpit, from the energy of joy to the energy of anger, from a retreat in a cave to a walk in a city park, from effortful pranayamas to the spontaneous suspension at the beginning and end of each natural breath: everything is sadhana, everything contains the seeds of freedom ready to hand. Nothing and no one is left out.
Darkness is only dark when we are not established in the experiential knowledge that darkness is also the light of consciousness. Through sadhana and grace, the luminosity of all that is becomes palpable to us. Why does Ganesha, with his huge body, dance? Because he is nothing but the luminosity of consciousness. The heavy is also light. The only true darkness is separation from this fundamental knowledge.
A Tantrik Buddhist teacher wrote: Every moment is a bardo. This means: every moment is a death and a rebirth, every moment is a transition. The resolution of our physical bodies back into the five elements is only a kind of death and rebirth, a continuation of the never-ending process of every moment of existence. We are never really born, and we never really die. We are immortal, and most of us are unconscious to this fact. We move through bardos upon bardos with veiled awareness, and thus, a limited degree of participation in the life process. Tantra is a path of waking up into life so that we can consciously participate in the never-ending transformations of Shiva-Shakti, so that we can participate in our own immortality.
For most of us, the process of waking up takes great effort. We must undertake this effort at every step without a true understanding of the fruits of our effort. No matter what anyone tells us, what we think we are working toward, what we want, or what we read about the process in books, the fruit only becomes visible as we attain it.
However, as we continue with commitment in our sadhana, the View becomes larger and larger. We do begin to sense the fundamental openness and beauty of life, and our appetite for wakefulness increases as we get a glimpse of the promise of Reality without exception.
When I was a little kid, I used to long to see other planets. I felt confined knowing that there were millions of worlds that I would never visit. Now, I realize that those worlds are right here. There is no need to go anywhere. Infinity is right here, right now, and the grace of human life is that we have already been given everything we need to realize this.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
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