Tantra and Experience
Sunday, October 23rd, 2005“The state of experiencing (even-minded mindfulness) is the most important state – not what is being experienced.”
–Shibendu Lahiri
Reflect on the fact that experiencing exists. Just this fact.
Someone once wrote: at the heart of all philosophizing is amazement at the fact that something exists rather than nothing.
Experiencing is not a given.
What would the world be without experiencing? We have to ask ourselves these kinds of ground-dissolving questions. Or get someone else to do it for us.
A world without experiencing would be a world without awareness (mindfulness).
Usually, we obsess about “my experience,” or “having experiences.” But for now, just contemplate the state of experiencing.
The state of experiencing is one great flow. It flows along with awareness.
The state of experiencing doesn’t belong to anyone.
Amazement is a Tantrik practice par excellence. The true Guru, for instance, is an instrument of amazement. Always seek out situations in which amazement is cultivated.
Amazement leads us outside of small self-concept. The expression of amazement says it all: eyes wide open, mouth ajar, no self-referencing thought. It is no coincidence that the spontaneous expression of amazement and the facial posture of nonconceptual meditation are identical.
Amazement stops individuated thought, but it opens us to awareness. Amazement literally blows your mind, removing impediments to open awareness.
Amazement is openness without having experience. Amazement is one of the gateways to the open state of experiencing—unowned by anyone.
This is the most important point. This is why the poet Lalleswari says that realization is a state of continual amazement.
The ultimate attachment from which we suffer is the attachment to having experiences. Attachment to experiences is the most gross and most subtle hindrance to relaxation and freedom.
Having experiences actually blocks us from knowing the state of experiencing.
At first, it’s fairly easy to see how we organize our self-concept into limited experiences and how we cling to these limited, self-fashioning experiences.
Later, after we clear out the gross attachment to experiences, the more subtle layers become tangible.
These layers consist of ‘experience reflexes.’
The state of experiencing flows continually. The experience reflex keeps operating to grab onto experiencing, stabilize it, and possess it. Even when there is no story, or very little story left, ahamkara (“I-ness”) has a habit of picking at the state of experiencing like someone nervously picking a thread out of a whole cloth.
It’s really annoying, until it becomes funny.
At some point, this compulsive picking reveals itself as an expression of our fear of change and death.
Why? Experiences are static, like bugs pinned to a board. We collect them. The state of experiencing is ceaselessly dynamic: it is the essence of change.
It slips through without being caught.
When you stop grabbing experiences and open out into the state of experiencing, you also open out into the state of time. The state of time is different from time marked and texturized by the drama of “my experience” and “having experiences.”
The world of “my experiences” versus the state of experiencing is the difference between walking around in fifty pound gravity boots and ice skating. Or walking around in fifty pound gravity boots and jumping out of a plane.
Which is one of the reasons why Tantrik sadhana often features jumping from high places.
Even-minded mindfulness, or homogeneous awareness is the state of experiencing. Homogeneous awareness is smooth and dynamic. Nothing to slow us down and maintain the illusion that we can forestall death.
The state of experiencing exists everywhere. We don’t create it or have it.
Neither do we create or own the grabbing on mechanism. And the grabbing on mechanism is also the state of experiencing.
When we have full understanding of this through our sadhana, then we can grab for fun. We can play with the cosmic capacity for working with threads while still in a state of open awareness.
But then we will be weavers instead of compulsive pickers.
This is the telling of fabulous stories without being limited by the stories we tell.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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