Recognition
Friday, January 6th, 2006A young child whose mother goes on a trip may cry buckets when she leaves. Usually, though, children adapt to mother’s absence within a short period of time, even seeming unconcerned and carefree without her.
Imagine now that a father has informed his son or daughter “Mommy is coming home today.” Suddenly, the child starts whimpering “I want my mommy! I want my mommy!” Then, when the child first spies mommy at the airport, or hears her key turning in the lock, the tears flow freely, and the moment when it will be possible to run into her open arms cannot come too soon.
In the process of remembering our true nature, we are like this little child. The further removed we are from remembering, the more tenuous is our longing to meet our true selves. But as we begin to relax karmic tensions, and more of the light of Reality shines through, our longing intensifies. The force that propels us home grows stronger and can even feel overwhelming at times.
All of sadhana is a process of remembering and recognition. The word for this in the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism is pratyabhijna (pronounced: prat-yuh-BHIG-nyuh). Pratyabhijna means to remember and recognize the supreme Reality or the supreme Self.
Remembrance and recognition are not mere philosophical concepts. You do not need to knock your brain against concrete trying to intellectually understand what these mean.
Remembrance and recognition of the natural state are kriya: spontaneous activity. As activities, they have texture, taste, and feeling. You know what it feels like to suddenly remember a long-forgotten moment of love or beauty, or to turn a street corner and come face-to-face with an old friend. There is another feeling you can access that relates to pratyabhijna: that of being on the right “track.”
Of course, stalkers also have a feeling of recognition and rightness! But stalkers are slaves to compulsion. Luckily, with a little honesty and courage, we can discern the difference between compulsion and true recognition and remembrance.
As does recognition, compulsion has texture and taste. Our thoughts drone on repetitively. We are anxious, emotionally reactive, and in “high gear.” If we stop long enough to check in with ourselves, we can feel the engine of karmic hunger chugging away. The sensation of compulsion is nothing but a karmic pattern hunting for food to sustain itself.
Pratyabhijna, on the other hand, is unadulterated insight, direct knowledge, or true vision. It may come as only a trace, or it may come as a flood. In any case, allowing the insights and understandings of pratyabhijna to guide us always results in a state of greater mental and emotional calm. If we follow the flow of pratyabhijna, rather than fight against it, our karmic tensions unwind and our activities become more spontaneous, free, and appropriate. The sense of relaxation of compulsion is palpable.
When we recognize the natural state, our true nature, and make the choice to relax into that, it may be while we are sitting on our meditation cushion, or while we are out and about. There may simply be an internal process of surrender to the revelations of pratyabhijna, or we may choose to follow pratyabhijna by changing a self-harming pattern such as staying out late with friends who do not really suit us, or stagnating in an energy-draining job. Pratyabhijna most often comes in the form of an unusual yet wonderfully familiar intuition that signficantly changes our View of ourselves and the world, even if that intuition seems illogical by conventional standards.
We often feel terribly anxious before we make the choice to be guided and shaped by pratyabhijna. We may worry about what we stand to lose of our former comforts, friends, and life. Our compulsive patterns will jump out and try to grab us with even more force as they fight to sustain themselves. However, no matter what we feel, no matter how tenuous the taste of authenticity, if we have rightly discerned it, there is an immediate payoff of relaxation, increased energy, and a feeling of well-being. It’s as if we had been tightly clenching our whole body—our shoulders, our faces, our fists, and so on—and suddenly, we let go. Like that.
These moments are the tokens, the jewels brought by the messenger of Reality letting us know that we have accomplished another measure of our true journey of relaxing and living in harmony with Nature. Eventually, we realize that leading a life guided by pratyabhijna is the only choice possible for us.
Reality is responsive and reciprocal. When we open, it rushes up to meet us like a mother opening her arms wide to receive her child from whom she has been absent for a long time. As we relax into recognition and remembrance, as we live more moments of our lives in harmony with Nature, She becomes more eager to embrace us, and we Her.
This is, as Rudi writes, the time when we begin to be “spiritually worked” rather than “working spiritually.” The busy patterns that obscured our true nature from ourselves are dissolving. The forces of Nature, once unknown to us, become the moment-to-moment texture of our being and lives. The longing to live fully in naked reality intensifies as the compulsions we used to call our life’s desires fall away.
The beauty here is that the processes of the many enlightenments we experience along the way are the same processes of our everyday world: remembrance and recognition. Taste, texture, feeling. Longing. There is no separation of means between a life of compulsion and a life of freedom. Even relaxation and surrender are, in contracted forms, aspects of compulsion and addiction.
Everything we need is right here.
We have all of the tools we need. It is just up to us to use them with honesty, courage, and discernment.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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