Our Tantric Path: Connection To The Universe

The foundation of tantra is connecting the Divine within us (and around us) with our physical lives. Imagine that they are never separate anyway. What if this is one of the great separations that we suffer from? Let's explore how to connect with the greater world around us.

Transcript

So today we are continuing our discussion of the tantric path.

We've talked about having a connection within,

We've talked about the connection with others,

And today we're talking about connection with the universe,

With God,

With the whole.

In terms of the word God,

I tend to use the word God.

I had to kind of unpack that from my religious upbringing,

But it's sort of a word that I'm comfortable with,

But feel free to just replace it.

It's just a placeholder for something we can't describe.

And today we're going to talk about connecting to something that we can't describe.

It's interesting about the tantric path of connecting to the universe,

To the galaxy,

To God,

To consciousness,

To the world around us,

Is this really is the ultimate tantric path.

One of the number one things people ask me when they want to study tantra is they say,

Oh but I don't have a partner.

And I understand why.

I mean there's a huge focus,

Especially in the Western world or in Western thought,

That tantra you must have a partner and it's somehow sexual and emotional and all that.

And when we apply this idea of openness and galactic consciousness to our relationships,

They do go to a new level.

Like they do go to a level that is way beyond,

Oh well this is my partner and we've got a house and we've been married for 35 years.

It's way past that.

It actually,

Where there is beautiful potential for that merging of souls.

But that same potential is possible with you and a mountain.

Or you and a tree.

Or you in meditation with this ethereal,

Indescribable oneness.

And so we can already hear in the languaging how impossible this is to describe.

So if I was to say to you,

Well you know how do I do that?

How do I connect with something I can't even describe?

Like what a dumb thing.

Like I'd rather do the sexy tantra stuff.

And that's why the tantric path is so curious and it's so unique.

And it's whatever allows this transformation out of this kind of attachment to the physical world and allows us to start to blend the cosmic.

So for example,

There are things called yantras.

And a yantra is a classic tantric tool.

It's not a mandala.

It's different and it sort of is very geometric.

It often kind of has these little square like things with triangles in the center and there's often a point.

They're very geometric.

And the idea of a yantra is that you gaze at it.

You just gaze at it.

It's almost like it,

I picture it like a sci-fi movie.

It sort of like has these little filters that are going in and out of your mind,

Shifting all of the programming in your brain that keeps us so attached to the world.

And then eventually actually our single pointed focus.

And when we can become singularly focused like that,

It's like a portal to something.

It's like a portal to a different experience.

And then we look at the world differently.

And we all may have had a well,

Actually,

I would assume that all of us have had a moment like that.

And it may not have been looking at a yantra.

It may have been the sight of a grandchild being born.

It might have been eggs hatching.

It could be seeing a sunrise.

It could be something from your childhood.

I remember in the book,

Tantra Quest,

By Daniel Odie.

It was a story of him going off to meet this tantrica.

She was very elusive and often then he had to do a million things to get to her kind of idea.

And of course he was filled with all these ideas.

And this is what happens.

Something's intriguing to us so we study it.

And our minds get filled with all these ideas.

It's this and it's that.

And I studied Saraswati and I know this all about this.

And I know this ritual and I understand this and I know that.

We know all these things.

And of course she's just looking at him like,

None of this is of any value.

None of it for what you seek.

And she said,

What was your first moment of awakening?

And he said,

Well I don't know.

I have no idea.

She said,

You have to go and think about it.

Because there was a moment when somehow the matrix that we've been living in shifted.

Something happened that made you breathe differently.

That connected you with a different spiritual base.

These moments in time that all of a sudden you realize there's more going on here.

And I don't mean in a negative way.

I mean in a whoa.

Because we don't go on spiritual paths unless something happens that makes us start to seek it.

And what she said was,

You must remember what that was.

And if you've had like 12 since then,

Then you could use any one of them.

Any moment that you taste infinity,

Any moment that you remember who you really are.

She said,

All of your spiritual practice has to be based on that moment.

That is the foundation for everything you want to learn.

Every ritual,

Every step.

It has to start from that place.

Because the problem is like,

If we want to study something like Tantra,

But the truth is my focus is,

Well I want to have a great relationship and I want to be a great lover.

Well all you'll do is maybe pick up a few tidbits or I don't know,

You know it's not really about Tantra,

But there's lots of Neo-Tantra out there that you know you'll learn lots of cool things about consent and openness and expression and stuff.

But you're not actually going to be any happier.

You're not actually going to be more at peace.

You're not going to feel one with the universe or feel like you belong here.

Because everything you're learning is based on a lack.

It's based on the matrix.

It's based in something that's not real.

It's based on something we were taught.

If you've been in our chakra talks,

The idea that the chakras within us are actual perfection.

But there's a curious world out there,

Whatever you want to call it,

The shadow world,

The matrix,

Whatever.

And we have an interface between this perfection within and this world out there.

And that interface is often at what we define our personality as.

Especially if it struggles,

If we have difficulties.

If we choose to study Tantra,

Yoga,

Any spiritual practice at all,

Based in anything in the interface,

What's going to happen?

It's just going to compound whatever we're struggling with.

And this is why it's so important to remember subtleties.

Those moments that make you actually remember who you are.

From there we can study Tantra.

Because from there we're actually beginning with what's real.

It's like,

What's that saying in the Bible?

Don't build your castles upon sand.

It's the same idea.

We have to build upon the truth.

So it's a very interesting thing to kind of just think about the moments in our lives.

You know,

We've talked about this too.

My gym,

My teacher,

He used to call them reference points.

The moments in our lives where time and space stood still.

And again,

They don't have to be huge things.

Like for me,

If I close my eyes and I remember breastfeeding my children,

Time and space goes still.

The first time I ever stepped foot into a warm ocean,

Everything just shifted.

I remember the first time I ever ate tiramisu in Florence,

Italy.

I mean,

And that's it's a sillier example.

But any moment of pure bliss will do.

Because what this does,

When we're trying to commune with something that we have no words for,

We have to have a visceral experience to merge with.

This is a connection beyond the mind.

So we have to have this something,

Something,

Something,

Something.

So if you imagine,

Let's let's start with the world.

Like I have a thing for mountains and I don't live in a mountainous area.

So when I go west,

Or I'm traveling in the world or something,

And I see mountains,

And they take my breath away.

There's something about them that just make me,

I just have nothing.

That's interesting.

That's important.

So now imagine you're sitting before the mountain and you allow your breath to be taken away.

And your back relaxes,

Your brain clears,

And you allow yourself to commune with that mountain.

There's no words.

There's no ritual.

Communing with the world around us isn't saving the world.

Like sometimes we get really caught up in,

Oh I need to save the world and I feel the earth's pain and all that.

It's like the earth is the most incredible creation that we are connected to right now,

On a very visceral level.

She's been around for a long time.

So for us to be able to release ourselves completely,

Merge with her completely,

There's no thought,

There's no ritual,

There's no nothing.

It could be going out on your grass after class and lying on the grass and feeling the pulse of the earth through your back and just breathing.

And without any thought and without any analysis,

Just let yourself merge with her.

This is true communion,

True communing.

Imagine if you did this every day.

Every day.

Imagine this was your sadhana.

That every day you went,

I am obsessed right now with trees.

My favorite thing to do right now,

Because of course I walk storm all the time,

I walk along the sidewalk and there will be this tree.

And of course we've just come into springtime here.

So literally four weeks ago the trees were bare and now they have this full canopy.

And especially the oaks and the maple trees that just go way way up.

I walk up and this light gives me chills every time and I walk up to the tree and I allow my eye to go up the trunk,

All the way up the branches and I allow my eyes to gaze up into the canopy.

Just blows my mind.

And so this is what we do.

We walk around town and all of a sudden,

And it doesn't even have to be some great tree,

It could be a little tree,

It could be anything.

But the sight of that canopy changes my day.

Can you imagine living like that?

That everywhere you went you communed with the world around you.

And I mean everywhere.

Because the beautiful thing about Tantra is it doesn't have to only be spellbinding.

It doesn't have to be positive.

And this is really important.

When we want to commune with the universe we have to get our judgment out of our minds.

There is no judgment in the universe.

There's no judgment in the galaxy.

There's no judgment in God's space.

There's no judgment in all of this.

There's no right or wrong.

Everything just is.

Because if we're judging things as being right and wrong,

We can't commune with them.

So let's take an example like you're driving to work and you're sitting in your car.

It's sweltering,

Your air conditioning is not working,

You're stuck in traffic and you've got to get to some important meeting.

I'm sure most of us have all been there at some point unless you are blessed and live somewhere where this doesn't happen.

And you're sitting there and your mind is going,

This sucks,

This is terrible,

This is awful.

What if this just was?

Because again when we commune with the universe there's no such thing as time either.

Like it becomes pretty clear.

This meeting,

That meeting,

Whatever.

It's all just a human experience in a galactic infinite world.

And I'm not saying not to care about things.

We do,

I do care about things.

And as long as we're incarnate we are part of the world.

So I take care of my responsibilities.

But in that moment whether or not I get to that meeting or not is out of my hands.

Can you imagine communing with that heat?

Communing with the stinky traffic.

We are so taught to hate the traffic,

To hate this,

This shouldn't be like this and I'm gonna be late and think of the gas this is wasting.

And we have so much that keeps us separate from communing in every moment of our lives.

Every moment.

This is living tauntrically.

I'm sitting in the car,

Hmm traffic.

All right I guess I better send a text to say there's a chance I'll be late.

All right now what?

And we relax into what is and perhaps we have other thoughts.

Perhaps we have a great realization as we sit amongst the din of humanity.

It doesn't have to be a beautiful oak tree.

It could be waiting in the doctor's office.

It could be anything.

And of course it could be playing with your children or your grandchildren.

I used to love when I lived in Toronto.

I used to love going and sitting outside the dog parks and just watching the dogs play.

I'd like get a latte from Starbucks and I just sit there in total bliss.

And then when we start to commune with the world around us we can start being creative.

Like genuinely creative.

Because as we commune with the world around us without judgment,

We're just communing.

We're just a part of the world.

We might see things that are needed.

We might see things that need building.

We might have an idea and go hey not ideas about money or ideas but ideas for the community.

Ideas for the world around us.

The ideas like even if I sit with the mountain I think oh you know what I could I could take a camping trip.

I'm gonna take four days and I'm gonna explore this mountain.

Now all of a sudden your mind is pondering this and now you're doing stuff.

Because we can just commune sort of in solitude.

Like kind of just commune with whoever and whatever is around us.

But at some point we engage.

We engage with this world.

We engage within the communion.

Then we really start feeling alive.

And not alive from the inside but alive with the world around us.

Some say that the greatest pain that we live with,

The greatest source of suffering that we have is this belief or this feeling that we're separate.

And that can be separate within.

Separate from other people.

But it actually begins with feeling separate from the world around us.

Like we don't belong.

That is great suffering.

If you feel that then that resonates.

But if you've never experienced it imagine what that would feel like.

To see a mountain and feel nothing.

To see a tree and feel nothing.

To see dogs playing at a dog park and feel nothing.

If you can't feel something with the world around you we don't feel anything with people either.

And we certainly don't feel anything inside.

And that's why this practice of connecting with the world around us gets so important.

Because we all have to do it.

Maybe we had brutal childhoods.

Maybe we've had brutal past lives where we've just had some tough patterns that we're trying to break out of.

Well that mountains there for everybody.

The traffic's there for everybody.

Watching dogs at the dog park.

Anybody can do.

It's something we can all do and begin that journey of communion.

And it might be different for everybody.

It might be sticking your feet in a lake.

It might be petting horses.

There's a lot of equine therapy because there's something about petting a horse.

And horses are so intuitive that it reminds us again an ineffable quality.

Indescribable quality that horses have when you pet them.

That it reminds us of something inside of us.

Like that we're able to love something.

I'm able to feel this horse.

Even if I feel compassion I feel something.

This is so important to feel something in the world around us.

And this is why and we're gonna talk for a moment about the connection of God and self and oneness and that kind of thing.

You know often when we think about the connection to the universe we think this is like a seventh chakra thing.

That my thousand petal lotus is expanding out into the galaxy and I'm feeling oneness of Brahman or something like I'm.

But it's not.

It begins in that first chakra.

And if you're new to our discussions on chakras definitely look up the chakra 2.

0 series to look at the first chakra is abundance.

Connection to the earth.

The fact that we are incarnate here.

The miracle that that is.

We have to have that one in place before anything else is possible.

And the great thing is that we can all do it.

We can all go find our favorite tree.

When I lived downtown Toronto I used to live right near Queen's Park and there's all these old trees down there and there was this one tree that if I put my arms out I could have maybe gotten about a quarter of the way around her.

This is downtown Toronto.

I called her Maya of course.

And I would sit under Maya and I would actually try to see Toronto from her perspective.

Because Toronto's not that old.

Canada is a very young country.

And I figured I don't know how old she was but I figured she's hundreds of years old.

And so she was there before Toronto was.

Imagine she was there before Toronto.

She saw all of this build up and wars and stuff and all kinds of stuff.

And she's just been standing there rooted in the earth to find your Maya.

To find whatever that is for you that allows you to sit in.

But you have to feel something.

This is not an intellectual process.

It's like you almost have to feel it in the first chakra.

That if I was to sit with Maya and feel her roots in my root chakra.

And it's not an easy meditation especially if we've had struggles.

If we had a difficult childhood.

If we have difficult family.

We would have spent the first seven years of our lives disconnecting from our first chakra just to survive.

Even this being a goal.

Like imagine saying I am going to feel one with the universe.

I am going to commune with various things in my surrounding.

And obviously start with things that you love.

That make you feel good.

And then just allow that to kind of bleed into our lives.

And then we can play in the second chakra.

And then we can play with the third chakra.

Because again when you consider that.

If in our first chakra we can't connect with anything.

What's going to happen in our second chakra when we try to connect other people?

If I can't connect with a mountain.

Or if I can't connect with a tree or a horse or a cat.

And now there's a potential romantic partner in front of me.

Or a child or a parent or a colleague or a neighbor.

My second chakra is not going to work either.

And my third chakra who am I?

Well who cares?

I don't even belong here.

So we have to at least feel that we belong here.

Before we even care what our third chakra is.

Yeah whatever I can be anything you want.

Sure yeah okay whatever.

So the other part of this and this gets even more abstract.

Is this idea that the divine and the physical are all one.

That God,

Self,

The divine,

Physical it's all one.

And this was very interesting because back in the original days of Tantra this wasn't a question.

Obviously we are all one.

Like I don't mean you and me.

I mean me.

I am all one.

I am all God.

I am all physical.

Like what else would I be?

And don't get me wrong I don't have this incredible clarity.

We've all got lovely plugs into the matrix.

But to really be able to sit and close your eyes and imagine that every cell in me is divine.

It is a spark of the galaxy.

I am physical but I'm not just physical.

It's almost like imagine every cell of your body is like a prism refracting universal light.

And we happen to be taking up space in these bodies that we all know are just energy.

Under an electron microscope if you look at this hand that seems very very physical under an electron microscope all we will find is energy flying around.

Energy making up atoms,

Making up molecules,

Making up all these things.

So this isn't really hard to fathom.

The challenge is of course our brain can't fathom it.

Our brain is not made for it.

Our brain is meant to interpret our sensual experience of the world around us.

So if I touch my face the sensory,

The neural pathways from my hand touch my face and it sends a message to my brain and my brain says ah that is smooth.

Ah it's a little warm.

If I hear something my brain says ah that's the cat moving.

Or if I see something oh that's black and that's green and that's pink.

That's what the brain is made for.

The brain can't conceptualize these things and this is why our experience is so important.

And circling back to that first question what was your first moment of awakening?

This is why the memory is so important because this is where we had a glimpse of the God Self.

I don't mean us as gods.

I mean God,

Physical self,

Oneness,

Indivisible.

And when we can have that sliver of an experience and meditate on that,

That changes everything.

We've talked a lot here about satya,

Truth.

Satya lives in that place.

Satya lives in that stillness,

That quiet.

What is the truth?

This.

But what about this?

I don't know.

That's just truth.

And when we,

The more we can connect with that God within,

Again you know all our language is separate.

Separate's the God from me.

It's like if you just imagine it's,

We're just a oneness.

Well there's only one reality.

There's only one truth.

I don't have warring sides of myself.

It's one of the things that you know I could get in trouble for saying this but I think it's one of the most dangerous teachings in a lot of religious beliefs.

That we have a good side and a bad side.

And the good side has to hide the bad side and argue with the bad side.

Because what if there's no such thing?

What if we're all one?

No good,

No bad,

Just one.

Because this idea that there's this dichotomy or this duality inside of us that argues with itself is what makes us argue our own Satya.

Because we believe there's two sides but there's not two sides because we're a oneness.

And in this oneness here is my truth.

Everything else is other.

It has nothing to do with us.

So now imagine living like this.

Can you imagine?

Let's say every day we have a practice where we remember a moment of awakening whenever that is.

We meditate on it.

We do yoga.

We dance.

We ride horseback.

Whatever we do we go for a run.

But we do it with this consciousness,

This memory.

And we allow it to slowly flow through our body,

This visceral memory.

And then we go out into the world.

How different is that?

How different is it when we make decisions?

Are we worried what other people will think?

How could we be?

If this is just my oneness,

This is just my truth.

Think of how free we are.

Free to think.

Free to do.

Free to follow our path.

Imagine there'd be no oppression.

Why would I ever need to oppress you when I am literally the entire universe in this body?

And you would never have to oppress me because what in the world would you have to gain?

And I know this all sounds really pie in the sky sometimes.

But it's really important to know that every one of us,

And especially here,

We're on insight timer.

We wouldn't be here unless we had had a moment of awakening.

Something that the fabric opened and the light got through.

That famous Leonard Cohen saying.

And somehow we went,

No there's more.

You know,

And it's funny like even if you said to your a friend,

You know,

I go on this insight timer app and I listen to talks and I meditate and they're like,

Why would you do something like that?

And don't get me wrong,

I'm not saying they've never had a moment of awakening.

But whatever it was that they've had experience with,

Didn't plant a seed that desired us or that made us desire to do more.

It didn't draw them towards something new and different.

Thank you so much for being here.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

Reviews

Thanks for your wonderful words of wisdom Katrina.

What an amazing talk! Beautiful. Thank you so much 🙏

Mountains!!! Ah! Every day I get to connect with the mountains my California home is nestled in. Yesterday I went into the orchard and picked and ate … sweet cherries. Ultimate tantric connection. When I was very young, around my birthday (May 7), in rural Québec, I remember connecting with the warmth of the sun on my skin and having oneness moments. Yesterday, feeding my new baby chicks from the palm of my hand, connecting with them, another tantric moment. But also yesterday saying goodbye to my ex-lover who just broke up with the man whom he had replaced me with five years ago and feeling his heartache and witnessing his sobbing, that too was a tantric connection. So grateful for the practice of awareness helping me deal with the pain and suffering of feelings of separation.

Thank you for this most important talk about oneness and life’s most precious moments when I have mergesd with the Devine, infinity and the truth of what I am. I loved the crows in the background validating your words.