Ecstatic Revelations: Radiance Sutras Verse 54

During this session, we discuss Verse 54 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 we are reading from the Radiant Sutras.

This is a beautiful book written by Lauren Roche.

It is a translation,

An interpretation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

Vijnana means many things but it can mean wisdom.

Bhairava is the union of all things.

It is the explosiveness of life.

It is the excitement.

It is all that.

And Tantra actually just in this case means book.

It just means a book of sutras that help us experience Bhairava.

And so what we're going to do today is I'm going to read a passage.

And today we're reading passage 54 on page 89 if you have the book.

You definitely don't have to have the book but it is one of my favorite books of Tantra.

And then we'll have a discussion and then we'll do a meditation at the end.

It's a very interesting one today.

I'm very intrigued.

So let's sit nice and tall or continue to lay down if we are in a horizontal position at this point.

Now let's breathe deeply.

We want to connect inside our heart center.

Point deep within our chest.

The still point.

Your eternal self.

You who have been seeking whatever path you are on.

A moment will come when divine pulsation grabs you and carries you into its dance.

In the midst of ecstatic motion your body dissolves into light leaving only the softly glowing benediction of the bones.

You become the face of fury yet serene within.

Eyes fly open in amazement seeing the unseen vastness.

Or you become a tongue tasting upward into the nectar of eternity.

The soul reveals itself to itself through movement.

Energy infused undulations and gestures of hand,

Foot,

Spine,

Face and form.

The invisible loves the visible.

How does that make you feel?

What stands out for you when you hear that ecstasy?

That was incredible.

Makes me want to dance a prayer to the infinite.

The invisible loves the visible.

Bliss in being.

Movement carries spirit.

Ecstatic motion.

Freedom.

Light.

It makes me think my movement practice and the freedom and connection it brings.

Bliss experienced by full surrender.

Somatic intelligence.

Wow that all just gives me chills.

Makes me miss our ecstatic dance time together.

I know.

Maybe I'll have to get creative.

See what we can figure out there.

So this sutra is very interesting.

On the surface I am right with you guys.

That's exactly how it makes me feel.

And so I referenced two other books when I researched these for our talks.

One is the Sri Vijnana Bhairava Tantra,

The Ascent by Swami Satya Sangananda Saraswati.

And another one is this one called Vijnana Bhairava or Divine Consciousness by Jaideva Singh.

Well I'll tell you when I say that Lauren Roche does a it's not a translation of the sutra but it's a interpretation of the sutra so that we can understand it.

This is one of those sutras where he shines because I'm going to read you the direct translation of this.

It will all make sense in the end but here is the direct translation.

At the time of intuitive perception the attitudes of Karan Kini,

Krodhana,

Bhairava,

Lelihanaya and Kichari are revealed whereby the supreme attainment manifests.

How does that make you feel?

So we're going to actually talk about what the literal translation is and go from there.

And for all transparency here these words that we're going to talk about are new to me.

And I likely if I only I normally only give myself so much time to research before we talk I probably would have had to give myself about six hours to dive deeply into this to do it proper justice.

But it has opened a wormhole in my mind that I am going to dive into in the magic bookshelf to definitely integrate this into my deep tantric studies.

So what this sutra is all about is how do we actually live this divine existence that tantra speaks of.

So imagine where we start.

We start perhaps in a very confused poorly trained injured place.

So then we come to yoga,

Meditation,

A spiritual practice of some kind.

And that spiritual practice creates a safe container and it almost creates like a cage.

You have to do this every day.

You have to do this meditation practice.

You have to do this kriya every day.

You have to do this thing and it almost sort of keeps you still for a little while.

And one of the ways they they describe it is it's almost like you need to be kept still while your while your wing heals.

You can't heal out in the world being super active doing all the things that you did that broke your wing to begin with.

So the practice of yoga and meditation brings us to that still place.

But once we are healed we want to live.

We want to fly.

We want to experience every single bit of this earth.

When we're wounded we're limited.

We can only experience so much where we're afraid and we don't want to get hurt and all those kind of things.

But once we've done the healing work,

So to understand that this sutra is not a beginner's path.

This is a sutra that applies once you've actually really come to a place.

We need to honor when we're healing and we need to honor when we're ready to fly.

And it can overlap and we can pull essence from this as well no matter where we are on our journey.

So the five words that they they mention there are what they call tantric mudras.

But not mudra like the hand posture.

They can be a hand posture.

Hand postures can be amazing for connecting energies,

For flowing energies,

Connecting to various chakras.

They are real ways of manipulating this body and energy that we are.

But a mudra isn't only a hand gesture.

A mudra also can be an attitude.

It can also be an expression of the face or the body.

It can even be how we carry ourselves on the earth.

This is kind of a similar situation where asana is not just doing flying crow pose.

It's not an acrobatic pose.

It's a way we hold ourselves on the earth.

It is the seat we take at any point.

Why didn't he translate half the words?

Oh because it's just a literal translation.

It's a different book but then he actually the funny thing is in that book that I read his description of this was like four pages long which is really uncommon for him.

So we're going to look at these five tantric mudras that he mentioned.

The first one is called kerenkini and kerenkini means it means skeleton.

So imagine yourself you take the posture of skeleton.

So you have no attachment to objects,

Past experiences.

You wander through the world as a skeleton and not in a negative way because again to understand we've come to a place in our life where we've realized that everything comes and goes like we can experience all things when they come to us.

What this skeleton type posture is is that we have no desires and we have nothing that repulses us.

When we see things in the world we neither like them nor dislike them.

We have no attachment whether something's right,

Wrong,

Good,

Bad.

It's not like that.

It's like we are the flow-through tea bag wandering through life.

So just for a moment imagine that and take your highest self.

We have to allow ourselves to transcend our thoughts for a moment and this was actually a big part of the discussion in one of the books was that intuition flows when we have transcended our thought forms.

That our mind isn't in the way of our intuition.

So even to imagine this feeling,

This skeletal feeling of wandering through the world we have to get over our thought forms and feel our eternal self and feel the freedom that that is.

We're not attached to repeating past experiences.

We're not attached to accumulating that thing or achieving that goal.

We just live.

So this is the first Tantric Mudra Karankini.

The second one is Krodhana and Krodhana means anger and this is really interesting because what this can look like is screwing up your face in a really angry posture like really screwing your face up.

Like even right now just feel that.

Allow your face to screw up and really get tight and really hold it and then release it.

And what they talk about is they talk about all the tattvas and the tattvas are beyond the scope of this but it's not just it's earth,

Fire,

Water,

Wind,

Ether but it's also all the ways we experience those things.

Our eyes,

Our nose,

Our mouth,

Our bodies.

It's many many things but imagine all of manifest reality,

All of your manifest life and you pull it all,

All the emotions you've ever had like right now.

Imagine the frustration,

The anger,

The the happiness,

The longing,

The grieving,

Everything you're feeling right now.

Draw it all into yourself.

Screw your face up.

Hold your body tight and then release it.

It's like bringing all of our manifest reality back to source.

Back to our infinite self and then releasing it.

And this is very interesting.

It's a very interesting part of life to allow ourselves to feel everything.

Again like you think back to that cage that yogic cage that we create so that we are safe.

I don't feel things.

I am immune to that.

I am meditating.

I am above feeling anger.

I am above feeling sadness.

I understand the cycle of life and I don't feel grief.

You know all that stuff and that's okay.

It's good to practice that instead of being completely overthrown by emotions but at some point you come to peace with it all and you do express emotions and you allow your face to get angry and you actually make bodily emotions and you do stuff.

And again this isn't being mean or being angry at people but you are expressive.

You are an expressive human being.

You don't have to control your expressions.

Like that's a really big deal and this is called Krodhana.

Imagine living like this.

This is a living mudra.

The next one is Bhairava.

Bhairava they call the no mind attitude.

And so what this is is imagine you're sitting there and you gaze out upon the earth.

This is a really interesting one.

Your eyes are open and you're looking out at the earth but you're actually all your attention is inside.

You're sitting and you're gazing out at the earth but it's like you're drawing all of those things into you.

You see the ocean and it becomes a part of you.

So your eyes are gazing out at the ocean but you're feeling it inside.

Your eyes are gazing at the blue sky but you're feeling the blue sky inside.

This is Bhairava.

This is the tantric mudra of Bhairava.

Imagine living like that.

Imagine today going out into the rest of your day with the mudra of Bhairava and all things to see even people happy and bringing that happiness within.

Seeing people sad and bringing that sadness within.

It feels impossible right?

We only want to bring the happy in but it's all just reality.

This is Bhairava.

And the next one is called Lali Hanaya.

Lali Hanaya and it means flame.

And I need to research this one more but essentially it's when you connect your eye consciousness with divine consciousness.

When you actually feel yourself as an extension of divine oneness.

And you walk through the world with this beautiful awareness that you are a refraction of God.

You are the flame.

You are manifest divinity.

That's a nice mudra to hold as we walk through life.

And the last one's really interesting and it's really complicated which which means that one I have to do a lot more research on it and two I haven't fully grasped it to be honest.

It's called Kachari and this is a word that's used a lot in various tantric practices and yoga practices and you'll hear Kachari mudra and you'll use Kachari in many ways.

You might use it to invert the tongue and press it up against the upper palate and block the nasal and you do all these crazy things.

And so you may have heard this before for sure.

What it actually literally means is that which moves in empty sky and space.

And what's interesting about Kachari and even within the teachings within the tantric teachings there's like four different ways you do it depending on your state of study,

Depending on where you're at.

And again I have a lot more research to do about this to actually understand it properly.

But in its essence it's about experiencing Amrita,

The nectar of the gods,

The nectar,

The divine nectar that is within us and feeling it flood our bodies.

And there's many different paths to it which is all the different Kachari exercises and mudras and meditations.

But essentially it's feeling that nectar flood our bodies.

So these are the five ways that we spread our wings and we leave the cage and we live.

And it's interesting when we hear Lauren Roche's interpretation of this.

I'm just going to read it out loud for a minute.

I'll read it again later during the meditation.

He's so clever.

I love Lauren Roche so much.

So here's what he says.

You who have been seeking whatever path you are on,

A moment will come when divine pulsation grabs you and carries you into its dance in the midst of ecstatic motion.

Your body dissolves into light leaving only the softly glowing benediction of the bones.

This is Karen Keeney being a skeleton on the earth.

You become the face of fury yet serene within.

Krodhana.

Eyes fly open in amazement seeing the unseen vastness.

Bhairava.

Or you become a tongue tasting upward into the nectar of eternity.

Kachari.

The soul reveals itself to itself through movement.

Energy infused undulations and gestures of hand,

Foot,

Spine,

Face and form.

The invisible loves the visible.

So before we do our meditation I'd love to know if you have any thoughts or questions about all of that.

Kind of a deep dive.

I feel like we could do individual talks on every one of those mudras.

I would love to know what your sense is of all of it before we move on.

I feel like it encourages us to be in the flow.

I almost don't want to fit it into words.

That's a great sign.

Well maybe I will end up doing talks on all of these because as I dive into my magic bookshelf I'm developing a big tantric program and I'm assuming that as I do it the individual topics will all come here to us.

A comment.

My exercise teacher who does some yoga refuses to do the corpse pose because of her death phobia.

Isn't that interesting?

I have that all the time when I'm teaching and I say about Shavasana and I can feel a pushback.

Not always and maybe it's dependent on who's in the room but every so often if I want to say this means corpse pose I can feel this like pushback and this is very interesting.

Fascinating way of looking at this.

As we arrive into the ecstasy of our true self the explosion of discovery that life loves our ecstatic dances which are unique to each of us.

And it's so cool because it's like there is no formula.

There is no way to live that's perfect.

We just experience life.

We just go out and we're free.

So let's do a little meditation to bring us through this experience or to bring it into our bodies and thoughts.

So wherever you are you can sit upright.

You can lay down.

Whatever feels good to you.

Let's close our eyes and breathe deeply.

Feeling this miracle of a body that we live in.

Feeling the belly expand as we inhale and contract as we exhale.

So in your mind's eye I want you to imagine that it's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and you're wandering down a peaceful path in the countryside and you begin to walk down a path through some trees.

It's just a kind of an open forest but there's birds the smell of the leaves blue sky the sun warming your face and you're walking along breathing deeply and you've been doing yoga and meditation for a long time.

You're aware of your thoughts.

You're aware of your traumas.

You're aware of your past.

You understand how they've limited you and you've gently integrated them into who you are.

Not that they control us any longer.

They're just part of our story and we're able to be beautifully present as we walk through the woods through the trees.

We're able to be aware of our breath cherishing every moment every footfall every breath.

We feel alive and happy and free and we're coming up to a beautiful small lake and of course there is a bench where the universe allows us to go and sit.

So we go and we sit down on the bench.

It's the perfect height.

It's comfortable and we close our eyes and just think about our own life and we feel so much thankfulness for everything that's happened for good for bad All just experiences.

Water flowing down the river and we suddenly become aware of our spiritual body.

We realize that all of these experiences are just transient parts of this interesting world that we live in.

We almost feel and become aware of this interesting shell that we are inhabiting.

That we are blessed to have all these earthly experiences in but we feel no attachment to them.

We're just thankful for all of them and we feel the energy flow effortlessly through us.

Past,

Present,

Future.

We remain right here in the moment and then thoughts start to come in about our current life.

This interesting incarnation we've been given.

We realize that some things really bother us and we allow that sensation to rise and we feel our blood alive and powerful and we do care and that bothers us and I don't like that and we love the feeling and we allow that anger to rise,

Flow through us and then it's released.

Then we remember happy moments and it fills us with joy and we allow that joy to flow through us and weirdly it feels very similar to the anger and we just start having memories from our life.

Happy,

Sad,

Painful,

Joyful and they all just effortlessly flow through this shell,

This being that we are and we are fully here on the earth in this incarnation experiencing the emotions that come with being human and then we open our eyes and we look over the lake.

It's beautifully still and there's birds along the edges and little bugs floating and swimming across the top of the pond.

The sun is shining down and as we gaze out at this beauty we allow all of this beauty to come within us.

We feel the still pond in our heart.

We feel the singing birds in our mind,

In our ears.

We feel the sun and the warmth within us and the spaciousness of the blue sky throughout our whole body.

We feel one with all of it and we feel so completely whole and soon we start to realize that we truly are an extension of God,

Creator,

Source energy.

That our fingers and toes are like antennae of the divine in this world.

We feel alive,

We feel that electricity flowing through us and then we close our eyes again and we become aware of the energy system within us.

The chakras,

The nadis,

The energy flows within our body.

We imagine ourselves sitting nice and tall,

Feeling the chakras lining up from the earth to the heavens.

We press our tongue against the upper palate of our mouth and we feel it energetically connect with our third eye,

The point between our eyebrows.

We feel the third eye connect with the crown of our head and the galaxies and the divine beyond all of that.

And as we feel our tongue press into our third eye,

We feel the amrita of life flowing out of that third eye,

Out of the crown.

We feel this golden fluid flowing down through our body,

Down through the chakras,

Out to our arms,

To our organs,

To our hips,

To our legs.

We feel this divine energy gently flowing with our breath through our blood.

We have this deep inner smile about getting to live here on earth.

You who have been seeking whatever path you are on,

A moment will come when divine pulsation grabs you and carries you into its dance.

In the midst of ecstatic motion,

Your body dissolves into light,

Leaving only the softly glowing benediction of the bones.

You become the face of fury,

Yet serene within.

Eyes fly open in amazement,

Seeing the unseen vastness.

Or you become a tongue tasting upward into the nectar of eternity.

The soul reveals itself to itself through movement,

Energy-infused undulations and gestures of hand,

Foot,

Spine,

Face,

And form.

The invisible loves the visible.

So breathing deeply,

Feeling all of these mudras within us,

Going out into the world,

And every time we smile,

Remembering at least one of these wonderful mudras to live within.

Let's take a deep breath in together,

Exhale,

Let's open our eyes and come back together.

Reviews

I bought the book! Lovely to read along with you. Thank you Katrina for all you share, teach, are! 🌊💫🪬💜🙏❤️

Amazing wisdom you share with us through this book. A moment of my tongue touching my upper palette and connecting with the vastness of the universe. Thank you for posting these talks, they do bring ecstasy to my soul. 🙏