So today we are doing a reading from the Radiant Sutras,
A beautiful translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra by Lauren Roche.
And today we are reading verse 25.
And so essentially what we're going to do is I am going to read this sutra and then we're going to talk about it,
Sort of what it brings up in us,
And then kind of do a deeper dive of an analysis into it.
And then we're going to do a meditation so we can embody it and experience it.
That's our game today.
So let's just close our eyes for a moment and let's just breathe deeply,
Expanding the belly as we inhale,
Relaxing as we exhale,
And tuning in with your heart center.
The place that if I was to ask you,
Who are you?
The place where you would point at yourself.
I am.
Just go a few inches inside of your body and feel the stillness there.
As much as we may get caught up in life and the emotional ups and downs of being human and relationships with people and loved ones,
We also have this eternal stillness inside.
This is really the beautiful dance of Tantra,
Is to be totally infinite and eternal and fully engaged in the world.
So for now let's just play with that inner infinite self.
Just breathe into it.
Let's just listen to these words.
Attend to the skin as a subtle boundary containing vastness.
Enter that pulsing immensity.
Discover that you are not separate from anything there.
There is no inside.
There is no outside.
There is no other.
No object to meditate upon that is not you.
What does that mean to you?
What feelings rise or what words flow through your mind?
Everything is me.
I am everyone.
I am the universe and the universe is me.
Expansive but feeling of wholeness.
There is nothing in the universe that is not me.
Deep connection with oneself.
Deep connection with the universe.
Seamless connections.
Our skin dissolves as we embody the vastness in the entire world.
I am everything and nothing.
There is no inside or outside.
We are both at the same time.
Infinite expansion of this energy that is everything and that is me.
It means the start of my spiritual journey.
It started with craniosacral when I was amazed to discover vast worlds inside of me.
I'm going to read you one more interpretation and this one comes out of this book Sri Vijnana by Ravatantra,
The Ascent.
And this is a literal translation.
The Radiant Sutras is an interpretation for our minds to be able to grasp.
So the literal translation is,
One should contemplate on the skin of the body as a mere wall or partition with nothing inside it.
By meditating thus he becomes like the void which cannot be meditated upon.
One should contemplate on the skin of the body as a mere wall or partition with nothing inside it.
By meditating thus he becomes like the void which cannot be meditated upon.
So what's really interesting about this,
This sutra comes from the previous sutras.
It's sort of flowing forward where if you imagine the inside of us,
Like what is inside of us,
Is everything in the whole universe.
I think I'm probably when we do our meditation I might read more of the previous ones to help us bring it all together.
But if you imagine that everything inside of us is made of atoms and the atoms are essentially charged light particles flying in orbits around void.
So inside of us is essentially this eternal nothingness,
Void,
Pure potential,
Quantum field.
And everything outside of us is pure potential,
Void,
Everything.
So if you imagine our skin like the walls of a house,
You say well here's the house and here's inside the house and here's outside the house.
But really what's inside the house is exactly the same as what's outside the house.
And if you took the walls down the inside of the house would be the outside of the house.
It's kind of a false delineation.
Like if the walls disappeared it's not like the air on the inside of the house suddenly whooshes out into the outside.
It's all the same.
We've just sort of put up this barrier.
It's like I imagine making a blanket fort.
You're all in the same room or the same house and then you go and make a blanket fort.
And it's like okay but this is inside the fort.
This is different than out there.
But it's not.
And as soon as you disassemble the blanket fort it's all the same again.
I hear an invitation to consciously be one with the messy pulsing unknown territory of my internal body.
And this interior is one with everything outside of me too.
It's like our skin is an illusion.
There really is no boundary because it's all part of us.
There is no you.
And it's funny because when I first started reading that I thought well that's kind of depressing.
What do you mean there is no me?
What do you mean that I am nothingness and everything's nothingness?
And that on the one hand sure there's infinite potential out there.
There's infinite potential in here.
But what about me?
Or what about I?
Or what about I do matter?
And it's really interesting because Lauren Roche,
So in the back of the book here,
In the back of this beautiful Radiant Sutras book,
He talks about a word that's in the sutra called Tvak.
What it means is the skin that creates soma.
And soma is the ambrosia of life.
It also means the process by which the body creates ambrosia.
How it creates the blissful molecules.
How it creates endorphins in the body.
But it's also how it creates this extraordinary experience we're having.
This is this interesting paradox.
On the one hand we are infinite inside.
We are the same as the infinite outside.
But we have this interesting skin that is creating a very interesting illusion perhaps.
But it doesn't mean it's not real.
It doesn't mean that our experience isn't real.
It doesn't mean that it doesn't matter.
I remember talking to a friend once who I met in Boston and he said that he studied philosophy in university.
And it was this class had literally messed him up for his whole life.
Because of course it was about,
Well do you really exist at all?
And then if you don't,
Then what matters?
And 20 years later he was still chewing on this like,
But does everything,
Anything matter?
Like really?
If it's all just an illusion?
But this class,
This class is a class of illusion.
But this is where we have to embrace the illusion.
We get to create the blanket forts of our life.
We get to go around and create things for fun.
We get to create friendships.
We get to try new things.
We get to do things.
And this is where like kind of make a blanket fort and then be attached to it.
We can disassemble it and we can make another blanket fort.
But it doesn't change the joy of the blanket fort.
It doesn't change the joy of this curious illusion.
Or it doesn't change the experience of this illusion.
So it's a really interesting thing to kind of play with this illusion.
It kind of reminds me of the Zen Buddhist meditation on death.
That if you wake up in the morning,
This is one meditation,
I don't recommend it for everybody depending on where we are in our current life path.
But you wake up in the morning and they would actually say like envision your funeral,
Which sounds really dark.
But they're like but you aren't dead.
You're alive.
So what are you going to do?
How do you want to live?
How do you want to form this infinite space?
What do we want to experience in this?
So on the one hand there's this blessing of the skin.
This blessing of this incarnation we've been given.
And on the other hand we often can become very attached to our physical form.
We can become very attached to our personality.
We can become very attached to my circumstances in life,
My upbringing,
Where I am right now,
Financial situation,
Love life,
Whatever.
We can become very attached to it.
Which that's not the point.
The point isn't to suffer.
We're meant to experience but we're not meant to suffer.
And so it's a very interesting paradox to on the one hand fully embrace the skin we're in and completely also understand that what's inside of us is as infinite as the galaxy.
It also speaks to how humans like to create groups.
There's us and then there's other but we are really all one.
Everything everywhere is space.
But what is potential?
Right?
Like potential is so linked to that creative process.
Like depending on how we were raised and what we believe or maybe multiple lifetimes of I don't know karmic residue or something,
We really easily believe that we are victims of circumstance.
That we have no choices in life.
That I have to keep on going the way I'm going and I have no other choice.
But the whole idea that there is so much potential and that we get to create all the time.
It's a huge shift in our consciousness that we get to choose our days.
We get to choose everything.
Even within responsibilities.
If we have dependence then we have to care for our dependence.
But we have choice within how that's done.
It's like I'm just going to be a mathy for a minute.
Infinity is a very difficult thing to conceptualize.
How do you possibly imagine infinity?
It's not a number.
It's a concept which makes no sense really.
So instead imagine a oneness.
Like one thing.
Imagine a piece of paper.
One piece of paper.
Instead of imagining infinite pieces of paper,
Imagine instead that you can cut that piece of paper into infinite pieces.
You can cut it in half,
In a quarter,
In an eighth,
In sixteenths,
In thirty twos.
And theoretically you can keep cutting that piece of paper.
Keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting.
That it is infinitely divisible.
That's to me a much easier way to understand infinity.
We can divide one or we can imagine it infinitely.
It's the same.
Because even imagine that.
If all is oneness in that infinite true God space,
It is infinitely divisible.
Just like that piece of paper.
So now imagine our life and we may have responsibilities,
We may have hopes,
We may have dreams,
We may have struggles.
But each one of those things,
There are infinite choices inside of that.
If we really look at the details,
We can go deeper and we can find the places that we may feel stuck and we realize oh,
I do have choice there and I have choice there and I have choice there and I have choice there.
That's the potential.
Like that's the creative potential in our life.
I think paradoxically when we embody all,
We embody me,
The essence of me,
Is that we are all one and the entire universe is in us.
Exactly.
It's interesting because for me it has the opposite effect that that guy it's like wow how epic am I that I get to embody the entire universe.
Right?
It's beautiful.
Sometimes I feel like I've been cut in half infinitely.
I should feel more like confetti that can spread everywhere.
I'm still me in a million little pieces and isn't that a beautiful thing to realize too,
Right?
That very very often depending on our life and depending on our childhood,
Depending on our upbringing,
We often spend the rest of our life gathering all the confetti,
Gathering all the little pieces of ourselves that have been divided over time.
The last thing I want to mention is it's this phrase that's in both sutras where he says,
By meditating thus we become like the void which cannot be meditated upon.
I love that.
When you think of the word meditate,
Meditate does not necessarily mean sitting in silence.
You can meditate upon a subject.
You can focus on something and this is meditation.
It's almost like considering the word contemplation.
So all of a sudden if we are really attached to the body,
If we're attached to the skin,
If we're attached to our personality,
If we're attached to our story,
If we're attached to our struggles,
We will meditate upon them all day.
That is what we're doing.
We're actually meditating upon all of these things all day which is why if I say okay let's all sit and meditate on silence,
On nothingness,
We're like no no no no no I'm busy meditating on other things.
I'm busy thinking about these other things that are more important than nothingness.
So all of a sudden when we really understand that we are infinite void inside and we are infinite void outside and the skin between those voids is just an illusion,
There's nothing to meditate on.
There's nothing to think about.
This is going for a walk and thinking about nothing and what happens?
We start to notice the flowers and we all of a sudden see a house that we've never seen before.
We've walked that street 100 times and all of a sudden we notice how warm the sun is and we feel our feet on the earth.
It's like I saw a cartoon once and it was a picture of a dog and its owner.
There were thought bubbles coming out of the of the heads and the thought bubble coming out of the dog was empty and it said mindful and then the thoughts and the human were filled with a million things and it said mind dash full.
So it's so interesting to imagine that if we we can fill our minds with a million things that we think are real that we are contemplating and meditating and cogitating on all day long or we can contemplate the void where there's nothing to meditate upon and now we are full of mind.
We are full of infinity.
We are full of the universe.
Let's do a meditation.
So you can sit upright or you can lie down whatever you'd like.
I'm going to lead it as if you were sitting upright but feel free to lie down.
So let's sit nice and tall and let's close our eyes and as we inhale let's expand the belly exhaling contracting the belly.
On your next inhale expanding even more really slowing down the breath expanding out the front the side the back as you exhale slowing the exhale down bringing your navel towards your spine.
On your next inhale expanding the belly expanding the ribs gently relaxing as we exhale and then feeling your body rooted in the earth feeling roots going down into the soil with every breath feeling them extend with little tendrils finding new earth new moisture new minerals and then just scan through your body to see if there are any places that are painful or uncomfortable and focus on those places bring all your attention to the discomfort in your body and breathe deeply move to another move to another part of your body that might feel less than comfortable bring all your attention there and think then feel your body like the trunk of a tree stable strong still feeling those roots holding you in the earth bring your lower back forward a little bit to straighten your spine release your shoulders breathing deeply let's go within our bodies and bring our awareness to the organs in our belly even if you don't know what they are imagine a liver a stomach intestines and going deeper within them into the molecules that make them up and see the atoms inside the molecules and see them like little galaxies with all of this beautiful space and these charged particles flying around and then as you flow through your body noticing that your whole body is made of this void with this life this charged light lighting up that void feel it in your feel it in your fingertips that they are actually nothingness with light flying around inside in your head in your face even your brain all atoms void charged particles of light of the universe and then be aware of the air outside of you that you feel on your skin and notice that it too is just atoms just void charged particles light even as we breathe that air into our lungs and exhale and exhale we're just exchanging life force and then moving out beyond your body out into the sky the air outside beyond the earth into the universe all of this beautiful void illuminated by these charged particles beautiful creations and then notice your skin this beautiful creation of the charged particles that allows us to feel who we are it allows us to think about our journey it allows us to experience all kinds of things and to feel great gratitude for that and then to allow it to be seen for what it is the same void the same charged particles that is inside inside and outside of us and suddenly we realize that we really are the whole universe na kincit antara tasya diayam na dieya bhaj bhavet attend to the skin as a subtle boundary containing vastness enter that pulsing immensity discover that you are not separate from anything there there is no inside there is no outside there is no other no object to meditate upon that is not you i'm gonna back up and i'm gonna read the two previous sutras forget all of your ideas about the body it's this way or it's that way just be with any area of it this present body as permeated with limitless space drenched in freedom this body is made of earth and gold sky and stars rivers and oceans masquerading as muscle and bone every substance is here diamonds and silver magical elixirs ambrosia that gives visions herbs that nourish and heal the foundation of the planet immortal magnetic iron circulating in the blood every element in you loves the others earth loves rain sky loves sun sun loves the space sun loves the space it shines through space loves everyone equally in meditation luxuriate in knowing this deep and simple truth every cell is an organ of sense infused with majesty attend to the skin as a subtle boundary containing vastness enter that pulsing immensity discover that you are not separate from anything there there is no inside there is no outside there is no other no object to meditate upon that is not you let's take a deep breath in together take a deep breath in together exhale so thank you so much for being here and i hope you have a wonderful day
