Enjoyment
Monday, April 3rd, 2006Bhukti mukti pradata ca, tasmai sri gurave namah
Salutations to that glorious Guru who grants both enjoyment and liberation.
Tantra is called “Bhukti Muktikaranika,” the path of enjoyment and liberation. What’s going on here? Why isn’t Tantra called “the path of bliss?” Isn’t bliss, or ananda, what it’s all about?
I mean, I enjoy my daily latte. I enjoy walking in my favorite park. I enjoy gossiping with friends.
I’m enjoying life already, you might argue. Why do I need a spiritual practice for something so mundane as enjoyment?
Really?
Well, what if your doctor tells you to cut out caffeine, or you just can’t afford a daily latte right now? What if your favorite park gets razed to make room for an office building, or you move to a city without such nice parks? What if you don’t have any friends?
What happens to your enjoyment then?
Most of what we call enjoyment is conditioned by our strong preference for certain sorts of objects and experiences and our strong aversion to other kinds of objects and experiences. We recognize our enjoyments, in part, because they save us from states of non-enjoyment. We bounce between one habitual reaction and another. Only the labels change.
Tantra, being the practice of all-Reality-without-exception, does not reject this kind of conditioned, limited enjoyment. Nope. Through Tantrik practice, we recognize our capacity for limited enjoyment as non-different from our capacity for unconditioned, supportless enjoyment of Reality just as it is. The only distinction is that the former is under tension, and the latter is not. As above, so below. There is no “bad” capacity for enjoyment to be replaced with “good” capacity for enjoyment. There is one wave of capacity cascading from level to level.
The tension that shapes limited enjoyment is nothing other than avidya: ignorance of our real situation. So, the first step we take when we are practicing authentic Tantra is to learn about our real situation, to become aware of our tension. Doesn’t that sound fun?
Even when we are highly motivated to live in Reality, there’s always that little, or large, percent that doesn’t want to find out. And this is why we need teachers. Teachers help us to discover our tensions. They encourage our awareness so that we can begin to allow the compulsive patterning we call “enjoyment” to unwind, spread out, and relax….Ahhhh.
Bhukti and bhoga both mean enjoyment. Bhoga has more of a flavor of sexual enjoyment. Our senses and sexual energies are powerful expressions of Shakti that, when freed from compulsive sensuality, become allies in the process of Self-realization.
Abhinavagupta, the great philosopher and mahasiddha of Kashmir Shaivism, said that our senses are deities playing in the field of duality. Everything we do with our bodies is an offering. No one would stuff the mouth of a deity with two pints of ice cream, cause a deity to suffer through really bad sex, or make a deity work fourteen hours a day until she dropped dead of a heart attack.
When, through sadhana, we realize an embodied understanding of the spectacular creativity, intelligence, and wisdom of our senses, we no longer chase after enjoyments. We are simply in enjoyment.
But most of us cannot even imagine what life would look like if we were not chasing enjoyment, if we were not chasing food, sex, sleep, success, recognition, and love. In fact, our culture rewards those who come up with the most polished chase strategies and keep on chasing until death puts an end to the race. This is what we call a good life.
What would it feel like to just let go and stop chasing?
Terrifying? And. . .?
The enjoyment we realize through relaxing compulsion is the unconditioned, unsupported enjoyment of the world Self for the world that it is and that it creates. Such enjoyment is the hallmark of the Self-realized state. As both created and creator, you enjoy everything: all objects and circumstances. You just enjoy life as it is, arising and subsiding in every moment. This is the state of ekarasa: unstoppable aesthetic appreciation, or “one taste.”
This enjoyment of Self for Self has none of the flavor of possessiveness or grasping we normally associate with enjoyment. You are free to enjoy, not compelled to chase enjoyments. You are not even compelled to chase the enjoyment of asceticism.
This more realized state of enjoyment is based on an embodied understanding of the life process. It is quieter than what we normally think of as bliss, although not different from a bliss we might just call vibrant contentment.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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