Tantrik Refuge
Thursday, May 18th, 2006I was taking a walk the other day, and I saw a bumper sticker that read: If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?
In that moment, I recalled the first line of the Shiva Sutras: Knowledge is bondage.
If ignorance doesn’t produce bliss, and knowledge is bondage, where does that leave us knowledge-seeking, bliss-seeking, mostly ignorant human creatures?
Ignorance is not knowing our real condition. Anavamala is the root ignorance. Anavamala is our feeling-belief that we are individuals, separate from all else and all others. How could this root feeling of separation produce bliss? It might produce pride, ambition, neediness, loneliness, and hunger. It might produce certain kinds of temporary thrills and chills. But ignorance, or separation, cannot produce bliss.
Bliss is one of the fundamental “layers” of the universe. It doesn’t belong to anyone, and it isn’t produced by anyone. As long as you go around blabbing about blissed-out experiences, or even sincerely believing that your practice has produced a state of bliss in you, you ain’t got it. You are still in ignorance. Being attached to bliss experiences is a form of suffering. It feels good, but it’s still suffering.
When you meet the bliss-aspect of the universe, you are meeting something majestic, aware, and alive beyond words: the opposite of ignorance, over-emoting, over-dramatizing, and zoning out. This meeting will not be televised. It will not become the subject of online chit chat. You won’t refer to it as “my experience.”
If we want to be dualistic about it, more accurate would be to say that bliss is experiencing you. Ponder that!
If ignorance is not bliss, what about knowledge? Isn’t knowledge the opposite of ignorance? So shouldn’t it be bliss?
Human beings are addicted to knowing. It’s the most potent drug we take. Think of just how many times you’ve felt self-satisfaction getting the right answer, knowing more than someone else, or being The One with the best explanation, the final word. Think of the anxiety you feel when you can’t, or believe you can’t, come up with the knowledge goods. Think of how our school and working lives are structured around the chase for recognition of what we know and can demonstrate to others.
None of this has anything to do with realization.
“Knowing” is the insubstantial fence we build around the vastness of Life. Being attached to knowing is like building a fortress inside this fence and refusing to take a step outside your constructed perimeter.
This is what is meant by “knowledge is bondage.”
What we commonly call knowledge is nothing but a collection of functional protocols for navigating the world. These come in handy at times, but they are not embodied understanding.
I can raise my arm, but I cannot give you a complete, correct answer if you ask “How did you raise your arm?” “I just raised it,” would be my answer. This is embodied understanding.
But, but, you might object, there is surely someone who can give a complete and correct answer. A physiologist, perhaps.
Not so. A physiologist can tell me something about how an arm works from the mechanistic point of view. But me raising my arm is an infinite event in time and space. It is dependent on myriad factors, including on me being born at all, for instance. And being born has infinite causes.
And then we’d have to agree on the existence of an individual “me” capable, all on her own, of raising an arm.
The only way that a physiologist can answer the question “how did you raise your arm?” is to draw a perimeter around certain parts of my body and pick an extremely limited slice of time and space to circumscribe the event. Everything else must be ignored.
Note that “to ignore” and “ignorance” have the same root!
When Chogyam Trungpa’s student, John Riley Perks, asked his teacher how he made himself invisible, Trungpa replied, “You just do it.”
Just like raising your arm.
So, the question becomes, do you want to spend your life diligently honing some dinky arm raising explanation, or do you want to make yourself available to embodied understanding?
Tantrik practice is a hugely varied set of techniques for helping us to expand our embodied understanding of Reality and participate more fully.
We may become adept, but as authentic understanding grows, so does the direct apprehension of the infinity of the context for our lives. Consequently, we are less tempted to turn our always limited understandings into just another, bigger fortress.
Holding an open View of “don’t know” is the only refuge, and most importantly, the true compassion.
Why compassion? Because every hardened concept we project onto other people and life is an aggression and a violence that denies our common base of infinite potentiality.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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