One day, a young doctor came to say goodbye to Anandamayi Ma. His train was departing that afternoon. A devotee was combing Mataji’s long hair. Mataiji suggested that the doctor take a different train, but the man could see no logic in this. Without looking at him, she plucked a strand of hair from the comb.

“She began very slowly, with the most attentive care, to wind it around the first joint of her left index finger. She wound it with such precision that it made no more than a fine millimeter-thick circuit of her finger. She wound it thrice . . . and again addressed the acutely discomfited young man. ‘Every thing I say . . .’, and every thing I do has . . .’, one more turn, ‘. . . meaning.’”
—in Anandamayi: Her Life and Wisdom by Richard Lannoy

We often say that, from a Tantrik perspective, life has no meaning in the conventional sense. When people talk about the meaning of life, they generally want to discover what makes life important. Or, if they are speaking about the meaning of their own lives, they want to feel important. The idea of permanency is mixed up with the concept of meaning. People want to leave a mark on life, or they want life itself to be headed toward some kind of ultimate “solution” to the “problem” of life.

Expression, communication, and responsiveness are different from these conventional ideas of meaning. The person undertaking Tantrik sadhana discovers the expressivity of the world. The world itself is an expression expressing itself with delight.

However, Shiva-Shakti does not exist at some point without expression, and then, at a later point, decide to express a world. Expressing a world is the nature of Shiva-Shakti. The unmanifest base state and the manifest world are One. The manifest and the unmanifest permeate each other. Everything we see in our ordinary lives is continually coming and going. Or, we could say that everything ordinary is also, at the same time, infinite potential.

Expressions are communications, and communication belongs to the world of duality. We can only communicate when there is some sense of an “other” to whom we speak. The capacity of the world to appear in the form of different beings allows for the pleasure of communication.

But we should not limit our idea to communication between sentient beings. The entire world is expression and communication. We ourselves are communications, and everything that occurs is also a communication. Slowly, we discover that we are living in a rich field of communication and that our own individual expression is also a communication of the whole.

Communication includes response. Communication that is not received is not really a communication. As we go along in our sadhana, we discover the response of the world to our communications.

“Cause and effect” is the language many of us use to describe the communicative and responsive fabric of our world. But “cause” and “effect” are very impoverished concepts compared to the rich, seamless, weave of Reality.

A common way that we begin to participate consciously in the seamless field of communication is through ritual. Once we learn the correct ritual “language,” and when we are able to relax into an open, communicative state while performing ritual, we can begin to notice the powerful responses that ritual evokes. This can be quite shocking for Westerners who are used to performing rituals with a bit, or a lot, of skepticism.

More generally, at some point we begin to speak the language of the world more precisely. We develop precision in our activities as we get more in tune with the tune of Reality. This is the point at which we begin to hear the world conversation and can join in with greater awareness. Over time, we develop a sensitivity to the interconnectedness and communicativeness of everything.

When Anandamayi Ma declares that everything she says and does has meaning, She is the world speaking. She is letting the young doctor know that his narrow, ordinary reasoning is blocking his understanding of his real situation. In Ananadamayi’s Reality, the total Reality, all of life is a meaningful communication. In the doctor’s world, only “logical” statements or a limited range of other expressions are “meaningful.” He is a semi-literate person, while Mataji speaks, reads, and writes all of the world’s primary languages.

If you happen to meet any highly realized persons, it is often the case that they appear to be listening to things near and far, things not perceptible to those who are relatively shut down. What are we shut down by? Our tensions: our narrow View.

When we relax, we stop trying to fix the world with the glue of our narrow concepts, and, as the poet Rumi wrote, we join the flow of “constant conversation.”

OM Shanti,
Shambhavi

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