Ecstatic Undulations: Radiance Sutras Verse 19

During this session, we discuss Verse 19 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 are reading from the Radiant Sutras,

Beautiful translation of the Vijnana by Ravatantra.

And this is a specifically a translation or an interpretation by Lauren Roche.

And Lauren Roche is this really interesting man.

I got to meet him once in California at Esalen,

Where he did a workshop on this and it was just an amazing thing to witness his presence and his understanding of this.

So the Vijnana by Ravatantra is an ancient tantric text which really asks us to experience the world in its fullness.

We live a very curious life,

Like it's a very limited life,

That we think that our life is about the education we got or the job we have or how much money we have or don't have or what our relationships are.

And it's really easy for us to get really focused on these things that they kind of become our entire world,

They become our entire existence.

And there's more to life.

There's actually this expansive spiritual dimension that we can live in,

That we can tap into,

That every one of us is connected to.

There's a depth of human experience that we experience through the subtleties of life.

It's almost like the spaces in between the words or the spaces in between the sounds or the quiet.

This is the tantric experience.

And it's not that we set aside our day-to-day life,

That's not it.

And that's one of the huge differences between tantra and some other spiritual practices.

Because sometimes spiritual practices say the world is just full of distraction and nonsense.

You want to discard all that so that we can fully embrace God,

Totality,

Our spiritual path.

But we don't want to be burdened with relationships,

Money,

Sex,

Politics,

Whatever.

We don't want to be burdened with that because it's a low energy or something like that.

And tantra says all of it matters.

Like what's the point of us having this multi-dimensional expansive awareness if we aren't going to actually apply it to our lives?

Because our day-to-day life is fascinating.

These are the people we love.

These are the things we love to do.

Whether it's reading books or downhill skiing or painting or doing jigsaw puzzles.

Not that I'm talking about me here.

But these are enjoyable things.

So imagine bringing this expansive infinite awareness into our day-to-day life.

This is what it's really about.

Or this is what the tantric path is all about.

So the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a series of sutras,

A series of passages that ask us to experience something in the subtle plane.

But we do it through the world.

Like today our sutra is about sound.

About here we are,

We're talking,

We sing,

We laugh,

We make sound all the time.

But what if there's something deeper about something as simple as sound?

And what if this simple idea of sound can expand us into other dimensions?

So what we're going to do is I'm going to read a passage and the idea is for us to kind of close our eyes.

Even if you own the book,

Which I highly recommend.

This is one of my favorite books ever written.

It's just such a beautiful,

Beautiful poetic expression of life.

So I highly recommend it.

But even if you own it,

To just set it down and close your eyes and allow your soul to hear it.

Allow our multi-dimensional selves to hear what we're talking about or to hear what's being spoken.

And what's really cool about that is our conscious mind often is limited by our language because that's what we connect,

What we know.

We believe that what I can say is what I know.

But the truth is we know way more than what we can express through words.

It's like there's this whole backdrop that's so much more.

It's like you know when you're somewhere,

Let's say I remember when my kids,

When we first went out west in Canada and we were driving out towards the Rocky Mountains.

And my kids were younger and younger young teenagers.

And you look up and you look at these mountains.

And this first time we'd ever seen mountains.

There's not mountains like that in Ontario where we live.

And it's breathtaking.

Like it's absolutely breathtaking.

So on our digital camera at the time,

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures of these mountains.

But of course when you look at them later,

They don't even begin to touch the experience of seeing them.

Because there's so much more than what can be captured on a camera.

And in many ways that's like our experience of life.

What we capture on the camera is very similar to what we can describe in words.

It's so limited.

So it's always interesting just to back up and allow ourselves to know more than we can express verbally or that we know more than we can even think about.

So that's sort of our journey with these sutras.

So for anyone who has the book,

Today we are reading number 19 on page 54.

So how today will work is I will read the sutra a couple times.

Then we'll have a discussion about it.

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

And then I'll reread the sutra in Sanskrit and then in English.

All right,

Let's take a deep breath in.

Exhale.

Let's close our eyes.

And here we go.

Bodies feed on sound.

Sonic waves on inner waters nourish every nerve.

Vibration strengthens bones.

Ecstatic undulation awaits you.

Take a bite of crunchy K,

Slippery S,

A rugged R.

Enjoy a yummy vowel.

Ah,

E,

Oo,

Oh.

Throw it in a bowl of mmm.

Treasure the impact on your tongue.

Cream,

Cream,

Cream,

Ram,

Yum,

Cream,

Lam.

Pronounce a sound out loud.

Then whisper softly.

Now hear with your inner ear.

Allow the resonance to enchant you within.

The sound goes on,

Resounding,

Continuing of itself.

As the hum dissolves into silence,

Be nurtured in the tenderness of infinite space.

All right,

What stays with you?

What feelings rise?

What words roll through your mind?

My energy just rose.

My hands are so cold in a very energetic,

Enjoyable cold.

I am energy,

Vibration,

And sound.

All is energy and sound out into infinite space.

Rest in the sound.

Like om,

I vibrate with and without sound on and on.

That is what I come from and why I resonate in it.

I made the om sound.

I'm going to read another translation of this.

This is from the book Sri Vijnana Bhairava Tantra,

The Ascent.

It says,

By repetition of all the gross letters of the Bija mantras successively,

Including the M and meditating thus on the void within each sound,

One verily becomes Shiva.

It's a little harder to wrap your head around,

But I'm going to say it again.

This is a much more literal translation.

By repetition of all the gross letters of the Bija mantras successively,

Including the M,

And meditating thus on the void within each sound,

One verily becomes Shiva.

I'm just going to back up and read your comments.

I just came from a month in a very noisy space.

For a month my ears are sensitive and numb.

Now home in the quiet.

Just hearing a single voice sounds so different now.

Now I'm thinking of sound as the ocean.

I had a good giggle with the crunchy K and the rugged R.

Never thought of letters that way.

So the translation of this talks a lot about,

There's the three parts of the sound of these Bija mantras.

Now Bija means seed sound.

So if you imagine Sanskrit is a language that when you say the words,

The sound that vibrates through us,

Our bodies understand what it means.

It's like if I speak English,

My brain has to hear the word,

Interpret the meaning,

And then I know what it means.

But Sanskrit,

And there's other languages like this,

Is different because the sound of the word itself communicates with the cells of the body.

So Sanskrit is made of seed sounds.

The seed sounds of life.

The seed sounds that vibrate inside of our bodies.

So the idea of this particular sutra in this Sri Vijnanabairava Tantra,

They call this the Bija Mantra Dharana,

The focus on the seed sounds.

So if you imagine,

If you take something like LAM,

Which is the sound of the first chakra,

There's three parts of it.

There's the LA,

LA,

The L sound.

This is a sound of the world,

LA,

Or that crunchy K,

KK.

That's a sound in the world,

Or R.

This is a sound that we make in life.

So we make the LA sound.

And then we have this middle sound,

The AH,

Which is a very nourishing sound.

Wayne Dyer used to call it the God sound.

He used to have this God meditation,

Because all the names of God always end in this AH sound.

There is Yahweh or Yehovah,

Or Allah or Ra.

Everything ends in AH.

And so you have the LA or the KK,

Or the RR or the T sound.

Then we have this AH sound.

And then M.

And so when we chant the Bija Mantras,

The Bija sounds,

It's like we begin in nothingness.

We make the sound of the world.

We feel the resonance within,

And then we conclude with this lovely M sound,

The M,

Which allows the sound to then return to the nothingness,

To return to Shunya.

And this nothingness,

Or divine consciousness,

Or everythingness,

Is what they mean by returning to Shiva.

In this interpretation,

I'll say it again.

By repetition of all the gross letters,

These are the K,

CH,

T,

The big sounds.

By repetition of all the gross letters of the Bija Mantras,

Including the M,

And meditating thus on the void within each sound,

One verily becomes Shiva.

I want to read another beautiful paragraph here from that same book,

Because it talks about how the Bija Mantras are like storehouses of energy.

And when we chant these mantras,

And they can be anything.

Like if you Google Bija Mantra,

Like B-I-J or B-I-J-A Mantra,

It is a beautiful rabbit hole to play in.

Even here on Insight Timer,

You'll see all kinds of recordings of Bija Mantra,

Or Chakra Mantras.

These will all be Bija Mantras.

Really beautiful practices.

So this is out of that last book I was just reading from.

As these frequencies are stabilized in the mind by continuous repetition of the mantra,

There comes a point where the vibration becomes so subtle that the awareness is attuned to the same sound reverberating in the atmosphere.

I'll read that again.

But when you imagine truth,

What is real here in our lives?

What is eternal?

What is pure?

It's almost like there's a vibration of that.

There's a vibration of what's real.

And then there's a lot of weird static on the line.

On the weekend,

We were hanging out,

And we kind of felt like watching a movie.

And so we're sitting on the couch and we're looking through Netflix or Prime and stuff,

And they couldn't really find anything.

I'm not really good at picking movies.

And we came across the movie Bridesmaids.

And this is one of these movies that I've never seen.

Everybody kind of quotes from it and says it's hilarious.

And perhaps it really was at the time when it came out.

But for whatever reason,

I never watched it.

But silly little spoofs were coming up in my YouTube feed of it.

And I thought,

You know what,

We should watch it.

And William's like,

Oh,

It's really funny.

Like it's really a funny movie.

Funny movie.

So we sat down.

So I was all really optimistic,

Because everyone talks about this really hilarious movie.

So we're watching it.

And half the time,

I'm like,

I have my ears plugged and my eyes closed,

Because it's so cringy.

Because the problem is,

There's all these people in it with all these really challenged personalities.

They're really insecure for some reason,

And they're one comes out,

And they're just really self deprecating.

The other one is all about themselves.

And the other person hates their husband.

And the other person hates this and the other person.

And then you just sort of watch the horrific drama that happens when all of these really hurting dysfunctional people get together.

The problem with it is,

Is all the drama that is created from these people's inner struggles.

None of it's real.

It's kind of like the story,

You've got a story of three people.

And one person lies to one person,

They get caught in the lie.

The other person says this,

And all of a sudden,

There's this entire drama happening.

But nothing that they're actually upset about is real.

It's all just coming from this weird lie.

So none of it's actually,

There's nothing to kind of hold on to,

Because it's all just some strange circular smoke and mirrors nonsense.

We only lasted about half hour into the movie,

I couldn't,

Both of us,

We just couldn't handle it.

But the problem is that this drama is what we're surrounded by.

This is what drives us crazy in family.

Because we're really dealing with generations of people who have struggled.

And it's not that the struggle isn't real.

It's not that the trauma they experienced wasn't real,

Or the neglect,

Or the abuse or anything like that.

It's not that it's not real.

But the problem is the dysfunctional place we end up in,

All it does is create drama.

And none of it's real.

It's not eternal.

It's not the truth.

It's kind of like watching Young and the Restless,

Or just some crazy movie or some reality TV show.

It's not real.

And so a lot of our life is sort of this weird friction on the line.

So the sutras and tantra and most spiritual paths,

What they're doing is they're helping us come back into the truth,

And helping us have less attachment to the dramas in our lives.

Because we are very attached to those dramas.

We're very attached to the dissonance.

We're attached to the static on the line,

Instead of on the clear signal.

And the challenge is that we can talk about what the clear signal is.

We can analyze it.

We can analyze ourselves.

We can analyze our attachments to the dramas that are happening in our family,

Or the dramas that are happening in our relationships with our parents,

Our children,

Our partners,

Our lovers.

We can analyze them to death.

But very often,

We hit a stalemate.

Like we just hit a wall where we're like,

I've talked about it so much,

I don't know what else to do.

So this is where the practices of yoga,

Tantra,

Meditation come in.

Because the practices bypass the brain that's filled with all the attachments and help us experience truth.

And as we experience what's real,

More and more and more,

As we have this visceral experience,

More and more and more,

Eventually,

That wins.

We so identify with that pure space.

It's like,

I'm going to keep picking on families,

Because families tend to have the most concerted dysfunction,

Because we kind of feel like we're obligated to hang out.

So imagine you're at some family gathering,

And there's some dramas going on.

And that drama is sort of percolating over there.

And these people are heading downstairs to play pool instead.

And these people are going outside for a cigarette.

And the whole family is just drunk and drunk and drunk.

And the whole family is just trying to hold it together.

And it's going to explode.

And you know,

It's just all and you it's all nonsense.

It's all just static on the line,

Because no one's telling the truth.

No one's actually talking about what's really going on.

Or people are just too immature,

Emotionally,

To actually talk about it,

Or they're not sober of mind and spirit.

So they just can't actually talk about it.

So it's crazy.

And you feel your just swirling.

So imagine you go for a walk,

And you walk down into the woods.

You sit by the lake,

And you take a deep breath in,

And you exhale,

And you're surrounded by real,

You're surrounded by the real vibration of life.

The vibration of water,

Earth,

Trees.

There's no dissonance.

There's no static.

And the longer we sit by the lake,

The clearer we are.

In order to even come to center,

We don't even have to think about the drama going on back at the house.

All we have to do is breathe in the air of nature.

So this is really similar to what we're doing with sound,

With the Bhishma mantras.

We are surrounded by crazy talk.

We're surrounded by crazy things entering our brain that make no sense.

But when we chant the Bhishma mantras,

The more we do it,

The more we hear the sound and experience this,

What we're going to do in our meditation,

The more we do that,

The more our body vibrates with that eternal truth,

With that eternal oneness.

And then all of a sudden,

Our attachments to the drama,

To the dissonance,

Start to melt away.

We don't have to even analyze it.

We just don't relate.

It just doesn't,

It doesn't touch us the same.

So I'm going to reread this little passage again from this book.

As these frequencies are stabilized in the mind by continuous repetition of the mantra,

There comes a point where the vibration becomes so subtle that the awareness is attuned to the same sound reverberating in the atmosphere.

So what we're going to do,

We're going to do a meditation.

Now,

If you're at work right now,

You might have to do it later,

Because we're going to chant out loud.

Because the idea is to hear the sound.

So there are specific Bhishma mantras that are connected with our chakras,

The seven chakras.

There are many,

Many,

Many Bhishma mantras in Sanskrit.

But for our meditation today,

We're just going to focus on seven.

And all of them are these the same structure that we've been talking about,

That there's a initial sound of the world.

Then there's the ah sound.

And then it ends in the mm.

So for example,

The first chakra mantra is lam.

The second chakra is vam.

The third one is ram.

That's an R.

The fourth is yam.

The fifth is hum.

The sixth is om,

Which we actually pronounce ah om.

It's the ah om sound.

And then the seventh chakra can be the om sound,

Or it can be silence.

So you don't have to memorize this.

Because what we're going to do is I will chant it.

And as soon as I say,

As soon as I start to say lam,

You'll know that it's an L.

So then as soon as you hear the me say,

Then just begin with me and then join me in the lam sound.

So it can be a fraction of a second after me.

And the key with the chanting of the sounds is that we really want to have the experience of the sound.

There's a funny teaching that we've had for a long time where it's not just that we have small talk with other people.

Sometimes we even do spiritual practices like small talk.

We just go through the motions of it.

We did the thing,

We made the sound.

Okay,

You know,

I did my 10 minutes.

Awesome.

But we can actually bring ourselves to the experience.

It's like we can actually swim in the soup while it's cooking.

We can actually bring our current consciousness in to the experience.

And this is what we want to do with this sound.

We want to experience every tiny subtle bit of the sound,

Bring all of our awareness into it,

And kind of swim around in it and enjoy it.

We're going lam.

Go there.

Just like it's the most delicious orgasm and you just want to prolong it and experience every single morsel of it.

I remember one time,

There was a man I was seeing.

And I remember the very first date we ever had,

I was talking to him about Tantra and he wasn't really a spiritual guy.

And so he really surprised me when,

You know,

And I'm chit chatting about it,

Obviously,

Because I always talk about Tantra,

Especially to potential dates.

And he said,

Yeah,

I totally get what you're talking about.

Totally.

He says,

You know,

It's kind of the difference between smoking a cigarette and smoking a cigar because he was a cigar guy.

He says,

When you smoke a cigarette,

The goal is to kind of feel better,

But get it done as quick as possible,

You know,

Or whatever,

Right?

You're sort of the focus is the end point.

He says,

But when you smoke a cigar,

You bring the smoke into the mouth,

And you roll it around as your taste buds pick up and all the different ambiances that you're creating.

And you're the different ambiances of the smoke.

And then you don't even care about inhaling it because it's all about the experience of this.

And he's like,

Obviously,

That's what Tantra is.

Needless to say,

That relationship continued.

That's how we want to experience not just this meditation,

But all all spiritual practice,

Whether it's yoga,

Meditation,

Chanting,

Singing in a choir,

Running,

Everything.

I do really stay focused and just feel all the subtle edges and corners and dimensions of what we're doing.

All right.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do this meditation.

And then we will end the meditation and we will just sit in silence for a minute or so.

And then I will reread the original sutra from the Radiant Sutras.

So let's come to a comfortable seat.

You could be sitting,

You could be lying down,

Anything you'd like.

That's what that allows you to go into this experience.

Let's close our eyes.

And I'm going to lead you sort of assuming you're sitting just because it's easier.

All right.

So sitting nice and tall,

Relaxing our shoulders down the back,

Our eyes are closed,

Focused at our third eye point.

As we move through the mantras,

Your focus can move through the chakras as we go along.

So most people will know what the chakras are.

But for example,

And let's let our eyes focus our attention on each chakra as we go through here.

The first chakra is that our perineum where we're sitting right now.

And the sound is lam.

You don't have to know that I'll repeat it later.

The second chakra is just below your navel.

And the sound is vam.

The third chakra is just above your navel.

And the sound is ram.

The fourth chakra is your heart center,

Right inside your sternum,

Right inside your ribs.

And that sound is yam.

The fifth chakra is your throat.

And the sound is ham.

The sixth chakra is the third eye.

And this is om.

And the seventh chakra is your crown.

And here,

We're just going to experience silence.

We're going to experience shunya,

The void.

I will chant each mantra.

Join me a fraction of a second after once you know what the beginning consonant is.

And experience the consonant,

The vowel,

And the mm sound.

As the mm sound,

Disappears back into the void.

All right,

So sitting nice and tall,

Let's chant together.

Ah.

Ah.

Let's do it one more time.

Ah.

Let's just breathe silently for a minute.

Ah.

Bodies feed on sound.

Sonic waves on inner waters nourish every nerve.

Vibration strengthens bones.

Ecstatic undulation awaits you.

Take a bite of crunchy K,

Slippery S,

A rugged er.

Enjoy a yummy vowel.

Ah,

Ee,

Oh,

Or ooh.

Throw it in a bowl of mm.

Mm.

Treasure the impact on your tongue.

Cream,

Shreem,

Ram,

Yum,

Cream,

Lam.

Pronounce a sound out loud,

Then whisper softly.

Now hear with your inner ear.

Allow the resonance to enchant you within.

The sound goes on,

Resounding,

Continuing of itself.

As the hum dissolves into silence,

Be nurtured in the tenderness of infinite space.

Thank you guys so much for being here,

And we'll see you soon.

Reviews

Beautiful❣️♾️☯️⚛️⚘️☄️⚘️☄️
Thank you so kindly✨️⚘️
Namaste✨️🙏🏼🪔🖤🌸

Such a Blessing to have this Talks with you. I really enjoy them. They really have a positive impact. I feel deeply touched and inspired and will try my best to integrate this to my Life 🙏💓
May u feel Well
Lots of love,!

Love these talks. And the lovely sounds of chakras! 🪬🙏