Friday, September 01, 2006
More Gems from the Spandakarika
As I continue to read in the Yoga of the Spandakarika, I am finding more words of wisdom embedded in Odier's interpretation. Here are a few gems which deeply resonated with me, and seemed to confirm my own approach to matters of spiritual practice:
(This is from the song of an ancient singer called Sahajanandabhairava)
Whether I call it Mahamudra, Great Spatial Consciousness,
Great natural perfection,
or Ch'an, the state of absolute union,
I can neither conceive of it, nor pursue it, nor reach it.
I can neither come closer to it nor get farther away from it
Because it is the very nature of my mind.
In this total naked ness,
I abandon beliefs and concepts,
Philosophies and certainties,
All expectation and all fear
Then it comes forth from my depths.
This is where it has always been,
The Ruby of the Heart has only been waiting for
My silence.
..............................
Finally I opened my senses to the inexpressible.
I realized that the absolute
Has no need for my theory of the world.
So I stopped obscuring the real.
I stopped opposing the concrete and the absolute,
Body and mind.
I stopped rambling on about the clouds
And finally I saw the sky.
And Odier adds: Let us flow with the current of the real, without expectation and without fear, without attachment and without detachment, in presence to the moment.
Immersed in ecstasy, the worshipper takes pleasure in the spatial freedom. Limitless, he contains the world.
Odier then quotes Huang-po, who said:
The absence of practice is my spiritual method, nothing other than the One Spirit. I ask you never to seek anything because what we seek, we lose in seeking it. Then Odier adds the following:
It (samadhi) is an extremely profound experience that sometimes happens in unexpected ways, when we are not in the middle of practicing, or meditating. (By the way, no one has ever attained awakening while meditating, but always when face to face with the real. Even the Buddha experienced awakening at the end of his meditation when he saw the morning star.)
When we enter into samadhi due to our master being in samadhi, it is as if we are receiving the gift of the experience before we have the means to enter into it. Strangely we are overtaken by a state that that we know nothing about, even if we have read all the texts about it. Concepts crumble, expectations are completely shaken up by the space that pervades us. It is a very sweet state. There is nothing other than unbelievable, luminous presence. It can last a few minutes, or more. We might believe that in order to enter it, we must go through something violent or very powerful. No, it is a gentle explosion that scares us because we lose all support, all points of reference, all known dimensions. Escaping from the known, we enter into a dimension that is now neither space nor time: the infinite.
Here, I would add that the experience can in fact be quite profound and even explosive. One can be catapulted quite suddenly into this new sphere of reality. And, further, it need not be a frightening experience, if one has some prior knowledge, even from hearsay, and accepts what is happening as a natural process, a bestowal of grace from an unknown giver.
And, of course, we know from many accounts that some sort of transmission from a guru is not necessary to experience this awakening to the real. Spontaneous awakening seems to be becoming ever more common in our times.
(This is from the song of an ancient singer called Sahajanandabhairava)
Whether I call it Mahamudra, Great Spatial Consciousness,
Great natural perfection,
or Ch'an, the state of absolute union,
I can neither conceive of it, nor pursue it, nor reach it.
I can neither come closer to it nor get farther away from it
Because it is the very nature of my mind.
In this total naked ness,
I abandon beliefs and concepts,
Philosophies and certainties,
All expectation and all fear
Then it comes forth from my depths.
This is where it has always been,
The Ruby of the Heart has only been waiting for
My silence.
..............................
Finally I opened my senses to the inexpressible.
I realized that the absolute
Has no need for my theory of the world.
So I stopped obscuring the real.
I stopped opposing the concrete and the absolute,
Body and mind.
I stopped rambling on about the clouds
And finally I saw the sky.
And Odier adds: Let us flow with the current of the real, without expectation and without fear, without attachment and without detachment, in presence to the moment.
Immersed in ecstasy, the worshipper takes pleasure in the spatial freedom. Limitless, he contains the world.
Odier then quotes Huang-po, who said:
The absence of practice is my spiritual method, nothing other than the One Spirit. I ask you never to seek anything because what we seek, we lose in seeking it. Then Odier adds the following:
It (samadhi) is an extremely profound experience that sometimes happens in unexpected ways, when we are not in the middle of practicing, or meditating. (By the way, no one has ever attained awakening while meditating, but always when face to face with the real. Even the Buddha experienced awakening at the end of his meditation when he saw the morning star.)
When we enter into samadhi due to our master being in samadhi, it is as if we are receiving the gift of the experience before we have the means to enter into it. Strangely we are overtaken by a state that that we know nothing about, even if we have read all the texts about it. Concepts crumble, expectations are completely shaken up by the space that pervades us. It is a very sweet state. There is nothing other than unbelievable, luminous presence. It can last a few minutes, or more. We might believe that in order to enter it, we must go through something violent or very powerful. No, it is a gentle explosion that scares us because we lose all support, all points of reference, all known dimensions. Escaping from the known, we enter into a dimension that is now neither space nor time: the infinite.
Here, I would add that the experience can in fact be quite profound and even explosive. One can be catapulted quite suddenly into this new sphere of reality. And, further, it need not be a frightening experience, if one has some prior knowledge, even from hearsay, and accepts what is happening as a natural process, a bestowal of grace from an unknown giver.
And, of course, we know from many accounts that some sort of transmission from a guru is not necessary to experience this awakening to the real. Spontaneous awakening seems to be becoming ever more common in our times.
