Be Flooded With Joy: Radiance Sutras Verse 100

During this session, we discuss Verse 100 of the Yukti Verses from the 'Radiance Sutras', a translation of the Vijanana Bhairava Tantra by Lorin Loche. A meditation follows our discussion.

These sessions are recorded on a weekly basis and all are welcome.

Transcript

So today we're reading out of the Radiant Sutras and this is a book by Lauren Roche where he took this ancient teaching the Vijnana,

Bhairava,

Tantra and translated it,

Interpret it,

Created a poetic version of it so that our hearts could hear it.

It's interesting I'm actually reading another book right now called the Shiva Sutras because I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to do the Shiva Sutras with you guys after the Radiant Sutras because we're nearly at the end.

What's really interesting is you read all the commentaries about the Shiva Sutras and even way back in like the 10th century when people were writing versions of the Shiva Sutras whether in English or new versions in Sanskrit or whatever,

Everybody disagreed with what the interpretation was supposed to be.

Like these are these aren't like you know Joe down the street at the max or something this is like these are the original what we would call the kind of fathers of tantric thought or something and they disagreed about it.

So it's interesting even if we knew the Sanskrit we may disagree as to what it meant.

So what I love about Lauren Roche's version of this is that it allows it to speak to our heart which is why so much of the Sufi mystics would write verse and poems whether it's Rumi or Hafiz or Kabir because it's almost like if they could speak to our heart we come right into the center Atman they would call this and this is our primal source of self and then it's almost like we get to hear the interpretation from that place as opposed to our brains which could misinterpret it.

So it's very interesting to remember that as we study the Radiant Sutras whether it's this talk or whether you listen to any of the previous recordings that when you hear the original or when you hear the poem that what your heart speaks is right or it's right for you right now or it's exactly what your soul is wanting to tell you right now and that's all that matters but again there's still no right or wrong it's just I guess that's kind of my point is even the great tantric gurus sometimes disagreed on what these sutras meant because they were kind of revealed to certain people so what we're going to do if you're new I'm going to read we're doing number 100 today and we're going to read it and then we're going to have a discussion about it and we may do a meditation we'll see this one doesn't particularly lend itself to a meditation but okay you guys ready so let's close our eyes just breathe deeply and if you focus on your heart center the place on your chest that if I was to say who are you that place that you would point that is your heart chakra atma the divine within you so let's just breathe into that see what comes all this talk of purity and impurity these are just opinions beyond them are the miraculous energies of creation rays of light from a trillion suns illumine the altar of your sky rolling blue green oceans sanctify the air you breathe in this moment you are inhaling their blessing who are you to call any of this pure or impure find the center around which everything revolves stand here and be flooded with joy what comes to you when you hear that what emotions or thoughts or words find the center around which everything revolves stand here and be flooded with joy reminds me of last week non-duality stand in your truth the pressure is off hmm majestic that we are all this I am the center of my universe I felt like there was a finger wagging at me at the who are you to part like who am I and who am I to question anything I'm with you I definitely felt that finger wagging let go and expand into all that is without judgment without labels without attachment and feel open to be flooded with joy flooded overcome something about that word strikes me hmm inhaling their blessings and flooded with joy glad to be alive I know nothing I am blessed let's talk about that being flooded with joy in the radiant sutras there's a lot of talk about something called vikalpas and what a vikalpa is is a thought form essentially a thought to understand that the mind is always filled with thoughts so what a vikalpa does is it causes constant distraction in our brain they're not evil they're part of being alive having thought forms is part of the human experience it's part of living in maya and all that but tantra is the dance between fully living in the world full of thoughts full of opinions but also remembering that we are pure divinity walking around the juiciness of life comes from being able to hold both of those realities in our minds at the same time and dive into it if you imagine you have all these thoughts and they're just battling in our mind we also have the ability to stop and remember but the problem is is that we get caught in the vikalpas it becomes our entire waking life from the second we wake up till the time we go to bed we're just thinking thinking thinking thinking and then the nature of the kalpas is that you have a thought and then you have a counter thought and it could be anything it's this isn't like a positive negative thing this is a oh look at that i love that bird and then the second thought is i wonder what kind of music it makes or oh it's kind of early for birds isn't it well it isn't and then i wonder what's going to happen if the winter ends oh and then so it becomes this constant you know thought after thought after thought after thought after thought and again this is our design right there's nothing wrong with that but imagine when we sit quietly we breathe deeply and we slowly let those thoughts float away we just sort of don't engage with them you know there's a great master that once said thoughts are fine let them float through just don't serve them tea just let them go by because then what happens is as the thoughts empty out of our minds we're able to feel the essence of life all thoughts are limited they're just a perception an opinion they let we like it or we don't like them but they have nothing to do with our divine self which is the tantric path to remember that so imagine instead that you kind of walk around life remembering everything remembering the miracle that life is as lauren says rays of light from a trillion suns illumine the altar of your sky rolling blue green oceans sanctify the air you breathe can you imagine walking around life fully breathing in the air that has been purified by the great oceans receiving the sunlight from all the stars in the galaxy that have reached us it's not about living there tantra is not about realizing this and then just going and living on the top of the himalayas or something that's not the point the point is to remember that and then look at your loved one even better is to remember that and then look at someone you struggle with and feel what that feels like and that's really the point of this sutra is this idea of purity or impurity good bad all those they're just ideas as much as we'd like to believe that there is an eternal good and eternal bad and all that it's not the tantric perspective anyway okay what's really interesting is one commentary on this talks about how when they talk about actually you know what i'm going to read you another interpretation of this so here is a direct translation of the sanskrit which is quite different than what lauren wrote but means the same all right here's the direct translation that purity which is prescribed by people of little understanding is considered to be only impurity in the shaiva system the shaiva system is the is part of where is where the vijnana by rava tantra comes from it should not be considered to be purity rather it is impurity in reality therefore one who has freed himself of vikalpas alone attains happiness another translation what people of little understanding believe to be purity is neither pure no nor impure to one who has experienced shiva or freedom from vikalpas is the real purification by which one attains happiness so this purity what they're talking about is that if we have this idea in our head that there is a pure way to live and there is a time and a place for this like this isn't a never consider this but when we're thinking about the highest realms of existence and at this point in the vijnana by rava tantra and the radiant sutras we're in verse 100 of 112 so we've sort of sorted through a lot of interesting thought forms by this point and it's okay if you're new to this but just to be aware that we're kind of looking at what does the highest mind look like what is our capacity for happiness what if there was no such thing as this purity and impurity what if we actually accepted that everything before us is just the incarnation of the divine it's just what it is freed of thought purification happiness no duality no judgment everything is in its rightful time and place exactly to just imagine what that could feel like what's really interesting is they said that the eye and the reason that purity is often considered an impurity like the very idea of purity is actually an impurity on the path to spiritual awakening because it's a it is a very strong thought construct that obliterates so much of reality so for example have you guys ever experienced this where maybe you take a yoga teacher training or you go away to some kind of consciousness retreat or or whatever and you start to really change the way you live you're kind of heading for this pure state and again there there are times and places to recognize that we may have things in our lives or habits that really cause us pain and you might call them impure and it might be helpful this isn't a zero use thing but have you ever had it that you know you start eating differently you start meditating you start doing the yoga you start changing everything but in your mind you're quite obsessed with you living a pure life now you're really living the yogic life now you're really living the tantric life now you're really on a spiritual path and i'm going to say in air quotes the purer you get the more impure the rest of the world seems the more intolerable family might become the more intolerable news social media politics what's going on in the world has anyone here ever felt that where you get on some spiritual path and the further down you go the more intolerant we become of the rest of the world or the more difficult it is to listen to what people are talking about and that's really interesting like what do we do with that like you kind of have to ask ourselves how can that be right you know like how can that help me it actually is making it worse you know like it's sort of like you think oh man like ignorance is bliss because you know if i didn't know how asleep you all were i could i could i could enjoy my life a lot more kind of thing right and so that's where this is saying what if we've got it wrong that it's there's nothing wrong with eating in a way that is really healthy for your body there's nothing wrong with meditating and clearing ourselves of negative thought patterns and karmic patterns and stuff we accumulated from our families of origin like that's all good but it's just for our personal path it just helps us stay on path it doesn't mean that we're living a pure life it just means that i'm getting closer to living katrina's life and we're getting closer to living our personal life but i'm not pure and they're impure i'm not righteous and they are not righteous and this is where the concept of pure like even in touch and in yoga we talk about it all the time we call it sattva living a sattvic life and again it's not wrong right it's not wrong to actually live and eat and and look at our thoughts and be aware of them and and kind of go through the purification process of our thoughts and our life and our relationships and our our voice and what we say this isn't an incorrect path but it's this concept that we are pure and that is impure that's where it all goes amok you know it's interesting like in in the reading there's a part in the reading that it says in this moment you are inhaling their blessing who are you to call any of this pure or impure and that does sound like a finger wagging you know like we're we're getting in trouble right now like we're being chastised so i remember years ago lots of you guys know this story that in 1999 i was sick i had breast slumps my mom had just passed of breast cancer and i met my teacher who really was the beginning of an entirely different life for me and i remember one time while i was still sick and i was seeing him regularly before i had a miraculous healing i was at his place and let's just say my vikulpas were in overdrive i was trying to figure out so many things i was in so many dark nights of the soul and trying to unpack so many issues and family patterns and everything and i was just like yeah well what about this and what about this and you think about this and what about this and did you look at this and you think it like this and i was just i just had a million thoughts and jim my teacher he just sat there and he just watched me and then he said just hold on a minute and he went upstairs came back down and he had brought all of these platonic solids that he was making out of paper and the platonic solids are considered to be the building blocks of reality the cube the pyramid the duo decahedron there's all these platonic solids and he started talking about this and truthfully i can't repeat what he said because i think he was kind of mesmerizing me or something but he started talking about how these solids unfold into reality and then he started showing me about how the frequencies of the rainbow the frequencies of the colors of the rainbow correspond with the frequencies of the musical scale which corresponds with the frequencies of our chakras who also show up as a rainbow and he said do you really think you're in control of anything katrina do you really think that all these thoughts and all this thinking you're doing is of any value to the universe and he said the universe is perfect you don't need to keep pedaling so hard just to keep it all turning and trying to decide what's right and wrong you know just live and something in that really struck me it's not that we're too small to question whether something is pure or impure we don't have to like what if instead we lived i'm going to say this i'm going to say like what if we lived in faith and i don't mean a religious faith i mean believing that the universe is really a miraculous oneness and we each are a unique refraction of that oneness our only job is to live that unique life that's it we don't need to decide anything about what that person's doing or this person's doing or we just live and what's really interesting and one of the things that i think we we struggle with we look at things and we think yeah but that's really bad and that's really good and this is really wrong and this is really right but imagine instead we look at nature and you think like according to our mental constructs the cougar is bad because it eats other animals but the deer is good because the deer doesn't hurt anybody or a forest fire in nature is bad but what if a forest fire is needed to open new buds new new seeds for a new a new i know that's a loaded thing to say these days but in nature natural right in nature everything just is and so if you know that there are cougars around then you take certain action and you're careful and you navigate but you don't have to judge it just is in relationships even someone might do something that you think is bad but the reality what is happening is whatever they're doing is just creating distance between you it might be perfectly fine for someone else but what if the people are directly stopping you from living your life as your expression of the divine you know it's a great question who comes to mind of course is is victor frankl victor frankl was an austrian jewish psychologist and he ended up in the concentration camps during world war ii and he wrote a beautiful book called man's search for meaning he talked about his life in the camps and he noticed how interesting it was that every single person was treated the same that you had no more prestige you had no more money you had no more family had no more anything so every the field was absolutely leveled and yet everyone acted differently one person would steal the bread from a dying person and another person would give their bread to a dying person he tells a story of walking along the trail to the camp or to the tracks i think they were laying railway track or something and he was truly suffering i think it was really really bad and the person behind him tapped him on the shoulder and kind of motioned up and victor frankl looked up and it was the most beautiful sunrise and he turned to look at the man and the man was smiling like our divine experience here we always have choice we always and that was one of victor frankl's great teachings that what brings us meaning in life are the choices we make in every situation the circumstances are irrelevant but how do i choose to process this do i choose to dichotomize this do i choose to say this is right and this is wrong and i'm going to stand in that or maybe we consider what if there is no right or wrong i remember when i was married i was married for 20 years to a very lovely man but you know we were young and we were farmers and it was a real challenge it was it was a challenging life and about 10 years in i was quite sure i was done with this marriage i just couldn't see a way through and i would pray for guidance and the guidance would be stay and what's interesting was that in that moment whatever i believed my husband was doing wrong in our marriage because of course i was blaming him completely which isn't true obviously now in hindsight 30 years later but in that moment he was neither right nor wrong any longer because i was meant to stay and learn something or shift my philosophy or find an inner strength find a voice that i didn't have previously there's something interesting that happens when we release ourselves from the right and wrong it clears the path for choice it's very interesting and then you know even in the context of this teaching to say and when the right and wrong restrictions disappear we are flooded with possibility we are flooded with universal truth we are flooded with our own will you know suddenly our own intellect comes into play and to be very clear that this has nothing to do with ethical choices and all that this is something else like you know they talk about sort of there being a lower mind and a higher mind and in the lower mind we have a million vikulpas it's kind of how we navigate the world we have a million thoughts and even right and wrong imagine the idea of right or wrong or pure or impure simply helps us guide ourselves on our path like if i kind of close my eyes and i think okay what are my choices here and if i make one like i know for me if i'm not sure and i kind of think it almost like we use the language what feels clear what feels light what feels easy that's that what we could call pure and then what doesn't feel light what feels convoluted complicated painful we could call that impure but it has nothing to do with the world out there it's just about us navigating the world just open your eyes and look at your body and be very aware of this physical world this physical role that we are right now this human form that we are living within perhaps we have lived within many forms but in this moment we are in human form we are this refraction of the divine in human form and we live on planet earth in societies that are challenging great difficult oscillating all the time between a million a million options and choices so this is sort of the world of thought this is the world of yes no right wrong pure impure all that stuff and so this is what we would imagine to be our lower mind not our bad mind not our unenlightened self just our human self that's it but now let's close our eyes and I'd love for you to envision the chakras along your spine at the root of your spine there's this beautiful red chakra this is you connected to the earth this is us incarnate here on earth the whole world at our fingertips just above there is an is an orange chakra and this is how humans relate to each other emotions back and forth connection moving up we come just above the navel into a yellow chakra notice the rainbow that we are and in this yellow chakra this is who you are this is your ego construct this is what makes me Katrina and you Carla or Benjamin or Keith or whoever it's important and then up from there we have this beautiful green chakra right in our heart center right in that middle and this is love imagine love shining out from your heart chakra in all directions the purest light shining out to all things all people and above that there's a lovely blue chakra that is your throat chakra that is how you communicate and express your soul and share your soul's path and your thoughts and above that is the pin is a third eye kind of an indigo color and this is how we listen within for highest guidance and then above that is the crown chakra our connection to the divine our infinite selves and just allow your spine to straighten and as you breathe feeling this rainbow of refracted light of refracted god self consciousness brahman whatever you see and breathe deeply into that because this is also you this pure light walking around a all this talk of purity and impurity they are just opinions beyond them are the miraculous energies of creation rays of light from a trillion suns illumine the altar of your sky rolling blue green oceans sanctify the air you breathe in this moment you are inhaling their blessing who are you to call any of this pure or impure find the center around which everything revolves stand here and be flooded with joy well thank you so much for being here i hope you have a wonderful day