Sky Naked
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007The poisons of attachment and delusion are infallibly annihilated only by the nectar of immortal naturalness.
–Dattatreya, The Avadhuta Gita
Digambara means “sky clad,” or “naked.” Among other uses, it refers to the yogin Dattatreya who wandered without clothing 4,000 years ago in South India. However, the deeper meaning of “digambara” is the form of human life exemplified by Dattatreya: life without the “clothing” of fixed ideas about the self or the world. Digambara means to live in spacious ease, without contrivance, seeking, or striving. It means to live fully awake in the fresh, open, spontaneous instant present. It means, shockingly, to hold no View.
All traditions, paths, and techniques are only preliminaries, or incubators. They assist us to discover naturalness. Naturalness cannot be captured by concepts such as dual nor nondual. Tantra, Dzogchen, and Dao mean nothing less than the indefinable fullness of Reality just as it is. We clothe them in labels such as “nondual” in order to learn, and as a convenience, but reality is always naked.
You can follow any tradition or way, but eventually, you must learn to follow the totality of life, or Nature. It’s like this. When a little child is learning to walk, her parents carefully guide her as she takes her first, shaky steps. Eventually, her hands can be let go, but adults still hover nearby to prevent serious falls. The little one is tenderly steered away from table tops and other pointy household objects.
Now she is walking, but she still doesn’t know the rules of the road. It takes many more years before her caretakers will allow her to go out and about on her own. Even then, her movements are tracked. Only when she leaves home for good can she wander at will. By this time, she has learned to “listen” to much more than just the instructions of her parents. She can read streetlights, smell the air, or watch the sky to determine the weather, walk in crowded areas without stepping on other people’s feet, know when she is tired and needs rest, and behave appropriately depending on the environment in which she finds herself.
It is said that our Mother is our first Guru. After this, we are lucky to find a spiritual teacher and a tradition to guide us, not just until we can walk the streets, but until we can walk with full awareness in the totality of life.
Along the way, we use our capacity to form attachments in order to help us to Self-realize. We shift our attachments from donuts to deities. We let go of more limiting concepts and take up less limiting, “spiritual” concepts. Each time we surrender into a larger View, we experience resistance and loss.
For a sincere practitioner, resistance, loss, and surrender are a single practice. We work with the energy of resistance to bring about deeper relaxation into a more spacious, embodied View. A feeling of loss is one signal that our efforts are coming to fruition.
We use our capacity to hold onto fixed ideas and concepts, but we are at some point asked to let go of these same fixed ideas and concepts so that we can participate more directly and fully in Reality. This is the pulse of the everyday life of a practitioner. The movement of relinquishing and refining our attachments is going on all the time. We grow more knowledgeable about the process, but the stakes get higher. As our View enlarges, more letting go is asked of us.
Many years ago, my first diksha Guru and I shared a beautiful moment. He was in the middle of giving a teaching when he paused and murmured the words “Tantra, tantra, tantra.” Tears came to his eyes, as they also did to mine. We shared a moment of love and gratitude for all that this word signifies and for the beauty of the word itself.
Today, I sometimes wish I could stop using the word “Tantra.” Although I still appreciate its many resonances and usefulness as a teaching tool, the sense of life I now enjoy doesn’t want to attach to a word. When I am using this word here on Living Tantra, or elsewhere in a teaching situation, I sometimes feel I am wearing an old sweater that has grown too tight.
View teachings are the all-in-all of any tradition. We learn View, we practice View, and we come to embody View. If we do this with constancy and devotion over time, View pushes us into the nakedness and ultimate compassion of “no View.”
The Dakini Machig Labdron taught a practice called “Chöd.” Chöd means “cutting through.” We cut through our attachment to all hardened concepts of self and other. We cut through our fear of death. The practice can be quite elaborate and includes mantra, drumming, and visualizations of offering one’s entire body as nourishment for other beings.
However, Machig said that the ultimate Chöd, the ultimate practice of cutting through is “Hold no View.”
Hold no View is not the opposite of View. It is not a rejection of anything. “Hold no View” means don’t hold onto anything. It doesn’t mean reject or accept. It just means stop holding on. “Hold no View” means to live without aggression toward life. Feel the inexorable flow of life when you aren’t anxiously trying to control it.
If you do this, even only in your imagination for one moment or two, you can learn a lot. You can learn about your fear of death. You can learn about the attachments you do have at this moment. You can learn a little bit about groundlessness and freedom. You can taste naturalness.
Dattatreya said:
Renounce earthliness. Renounce your renouncement. Then, the simple nectar of immortal, inexorable naturalness remains.
This way of life is harmonious, nonaggressive, lively, adaptable, expressive, spontaneous, alert, and as open as the sky.
Does it have to be called anything?
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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