Contemplations from
the 22nd lesson on the Shiva Sutras.
Sutra 21: PRANASAMACHARE
SAMADARSHANAM
When you know all
things to be energy, you will see all things as equal.
In our penultimate visit to the fountain of divine insight,
the upsurge of wisdom foaming and sparkling into our eager cups is as clear and
pure as it’s ever been. Shiva, as always, wants for our liberation and
empowerment, He wishes for our fruition and fulfillment; thus He’s produced yet
another rugged jewel for us to cut, polish and make our own for all time.
The true Teacher is plunging straight to the heart of the
matter (or energy to be more accurate) this week as His sutra delves directly
into the crux of reality and its substratum. He is saying in quite plain terms
that when we see, that is to perceive empirically for ourselves, that ALL the
multifarious and diverse elements of our experience are simply manifestations
of the same one energy, then we will naturally behold all things as equal. From
memories to moonbeams, sneezes to skyscrapers, they’re all just ever-changing
permutations of Shakti or life energy.
Although with their limited scope, our sense perceptions
report back a Universe of many separate, discrete fragments, each with its own
origins, composition and identity, Shiva is saying quest deeper, look higher
and unshackle your awareness from the village stocks of the senses. Take a
universal perspective on what is; and know the truth of oneness and the
fundamental, energetic basis of everything… literally everything from quarks to
quasars, emotions to empires, roller-skates to Rodin’s thinker and all stops in
between. These apparently unique, disparate items, beings, objects, forms are
all the one energy in more or less gross or subtle states. So a photon and a
battleship are the same energy in a subtle and a gross configuration, just as a
feeling of envy in the pit of your stomach or the sound of a Mozart piano
concerto are also the same ‘stuff’ just appearing as very different entities.
Understanding this sameness, this universality, says Mahadev, is the key to
unlocking our mental bondage to the pervasive notion of separateness,
insularity and the whole false and limiting construct of ego and the ‘I’, ‘me’,
‘mine’ mentality.
Shiva offers the following analogy to help illustrate the
way the Shakti/energy mutates and shifts but remains itself in essence. He asks
us to imagine Shakti as a river flowing and rolling, wild and free along its creative
course from unmanifest to manifest. Now imagine we take a copper pan and plunge
it into the ‘river’, we say ‘I have put the pan in the river!’ However the
moment we pull our hand and pan out of the ‘river’ we say ‘I have water in the
pan!’ In that moment the ‘river’ was given a new name changing it from ‘river’
to ‘water’. What if we then heat that ‘water’ over a stove? It will boil and
rise as ‘steam’, another name change. If we capture that ‘steam’ in a bowl we
will find it cools into ‘droplets of condensation’, which if we put in the deep
freeze, will emerge as ‘ice’. If we take that ‘ice’ and hold it in the flow of
the ‘river’ it will naturally melt and once more be called ‘river’. So says
Lord Shiva, we see that the river never stopped being the river, only the names
changed, those names being mere conceptual labels designed to aid our limited
psychological faculties in framing and ‘making sense’ of the infinite, eternal
vastness of all Creation. The mind needs to do this labelling and setting within
parameters so it can compute and ‘get to grips’ with experience, but it is
necessarily narrow in scope; so when we only experience life through the myopic
lens of the psychological mind, then we miss the ineffable boundlessness of Truth
and remain blearily blinkered and obliviously blind as we survey the drab stone
walls of Plato’s cave instead of wandering and wondering free and unfettered in
the unfathomable ‘is-ness’ of the Cosmos. To see the truth of the one energy,
open the mind then transcend it, as feeling picks up where thinking and
conceptualising fall short.
How best to do this though? Shiva has the answer. Start with
the closest, most obvious form that Shakti takes, and by this He means us, ‘ourselves’,
our very own life force, the prana coursing through our nadis, and then make a
simple conscious connection with this shakti-fest. He’s inviting us to step
outside the dungeon of the mind with its bars and meshes, ceilings walls and
floors and instead to engage with the unbridled energy of the rest of our being
as it is conducted through our five-sheath ecosystem. This way thoughts and
psychological forms can lose their falsely bestowed pre-eminence within our
experience, and the energetic totality can balance out and become a truer
expression of itself. This means sensations, intuitions, emotions, bliss,
thoughts and all other internal energetic phenomena can lead their merry dance
as multi-faceted Shakti, but we give no preference or priority to any of them.
We just sit as the subtle-most of all Shakti i.e., pure, pristine Consciousness,
and witness, feel, experience and indeed worship the less subtle configurations
as they play, emerging and dissolving, reprising then resolving… then starting
all over again… the play of Shakti, bubbling and dancing in all its guises
shapes and sizes… coursing here, flowing there, pulsing everywhere. One Divine
Energy!
Once we have escaped the padded cell of the mind and
established a meaningful and intimate relationship with our true nature as
undifferentiated Shakti, we then use Sadhana as a means to deepen and expand
this relationship. Spiritual Practice then becomes the interface between our
subtle-most core (The Self) and the sheaths or layers of energy in their
various degrees of grossness and materiality as they extend outwards; from the mind
to the gut to the tips of our toes and beyond.
When we know what we’re made of beyond all equivocation,
then naturally the question arises, ‘If I’m made of this energy at EVERY level,
then what’s She/He made of, what’s this floor made of, or that long winding
river flowing from mountain to ocean??’ The answer springs up like a Jack In
The Box. Energy of course… Life, Shakti, God Essence call it what you will,
they’re only name tags; the underlying principle is changeless, universal and
indestructible. It’s as simple and as complex as any paradox could ever be; you
have and are Nothing (roles,
possessions, identities etc.) because you have and are Everything…energy! Everything is equal, everything is One.
We are energy in energy, with energy on energy surrounded
and infused by energy as energy! Unity, Oneness, Non-Duality, Universality,
Total Equality but definitely and crucially NOT…
Name: Joe Bloggs
DOB: 09/09/69 Shoe Size:
10 Occupation: Ego.
So in summary, Shiva wishes us to know that everything is
energy and for us to begin to perceive this oneness everywhere. He invites us
to ‘drop a foot’ from the mind into the feeling instrument of the Heart, and to
experience the Life-force at play as ‘Ourselves’. We will discover how equal
all inner permutations of energy are when we cease judgement, analysis and
identification with them and just bear plain witness to their flow. He’s saying
once we’re established in the true nature of our Shakti and the equanimity that
ensues from there, then it’s only a hop, skip and a jump ‘outside’ of ourselves
to the Cosmos at large and all the infinite, shifting expressions of energy in
the Universal Dance beyond our apparent physical boundaries. Here we attain the
Divine Vision (SAMADARSHANAM) with which we see for ourselves the energetic
basis and utter, impersonal equality of all elements of experience, all items,
beings, objects and abstract forms as One… as Life… as The Divine.
PRANASAMACHARE SAMADARSHANAM
When you know all things to be energy, you will see all things as
equal.
The infinity of space,
The limitless profundity of silence,
The ubiquity of energy,
And the eternal now,
All support the truth of Being.
The luminescence that reveals form within void,
The stillness that sits unmoved in your thumping core,
And the consciousness that bears plain witness to the
microcosmic fragment or the macrocosmic whole,
In essential equality, these are the ultimate reality.
To know this energetic reality and this Truth,
Is to be at once present and perpetual,
In peaceful acceptance of the impermanent,
And in joyful surrender to the timeless.
When we seek without looking,
Ask without speaking,
And can know without understanding,
Seeing all as equal...
There is the Heaven within.
~ by Elliot Donnelly.
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