Temporary

That’s all we need. Like.
How far back to those notebooks?
Um, not very long, maybe 15, 20 years. I have notebooks that are four years old, you know, 35, 36. We should, um, I have a notebook. So actually I have such a fine line between being an archivist and a hoarder. We actually draw that long because you know, I collect things.
I collect ideas, books, I collect them. And, and, and since I’m truly not a daunting, I’m not the least bit of tight about collecting things, meaning, sorry, I’m always picking on them, but this sort of, that kind of spiritual garage sale that you get out of the vast majority of yoga, where you’re supposed to purge yourself periodically from your life and to the spiritual garage sale. And then you go and buy a bunch of books.
Like, you know, like the, keep it simple, stupid books broke. Can we just start the day by saying, throw all that shit out? Okay. Like throw out the, keep it simple, stupid books and keep your stuff.
Meaning like, because you’re just going to go out and get more stuff. It ends up being like a George Carlin joke. You go on vacation, you get away from your stuff and you’ve got stuff. You can bring it home. Then you got to get rid of your other stuff. It’s great. If you don’t know the George Garland, but you got to look it up, but there’s certainly one of the they’re really sort of two very big distinctive. One might say socio-historical like, like who are these people is really that’s, that’s, that’s a simple way to answer that question.
The, who are these people question in the history of the origins of these tantric traditions and that’s actually a reasonably good place to start. I’ll come back to my story. Um, and we sort of mapped that out a little bit yesterday, but just want to be really clear because in a certain way, it speaks to the complexity and the diversity of these histories. On the one side there, it’s probably fair to say that the first initiatives to the development of, of the history of tantra thought now I really do have to close.
So do make yourselves comfortable, get up, go use the restroom, go take a walk, do whatever you need to be comfortable. Don’t take a nap, lay down. Seriously. You couldn’t do anything to insult me or annoy me because I have taught undergraduates is everybody.
And not all of them are like these, but, uh, so please just be XB at your age. That’s the most important you can do. And we will, we will take a break like Sue will look at me and she’ll go back and then we’ll take a break. Um, this is also Sunday. So be sure you happily raise your hands. Look at me. Credulously anything you need to do to go WTF or, or whatever it takes to get me to try to say something again, that I have a really difficult time doing that if you haven’t noticed.
So you sort of have to count on digressive repetitions, but otherwise, um, feel free to look at me with interruptive angry eyes and I’ll do what I can, uh, I’ll do it, but it is fair to say that I think that it’s fair to say that the origins of, of the Tundra tradition come from a deeply seated, um, charismatic tradition of the shame and the holy person, the, the outlier.
Renunciant a sense of, um, and, and long before, one of the ways, one of the ways we, you can map the history of tantra into the history of yoga is certainly to look for sort of certain key words and vocabulary and ideas that, that are there and not there. So let me give you one way with just like a few handy clues. Like, because once we pass into modernity, all of these histories become inclusive composite.
It’s a mixed up muddled up world and sorting it out is difficult enough for all, for all the source reasons in India. But for example, potentially as yoga Sutra, not only doesn’t use the word or the concept of Kundalini, it doesn’t even know it there’s there’s certainly, and, and that not withstanding the fact that say that work of 195 or so threads sutras divided into four sections, almost undoubtedly does not all come from the single hand or from the single or from a, particularly from one single period of time.
It’s a collection, that’s it, it’s a composite, um, all the ways in which we would sort of try to ask ourselves, well, how was it redacted? Like how was it put together? Where, how do you sort of parse it out and take it apart? That that’s a much more difficult issue because the vast, because we can’t do that with any kind of definitive scholarly affirmations, like we don’t have enough evidence to really say, okay, for sure this, this, this, this doesn’t work.
Let me give you another example. So somewhere in the middle of somewhere 20 verses into the second book of potential, he’s hoping future somewhere around 2 22 18, he begins that he begins yoga is eight things. He begins. He says, yoga is rushed on to eight limbs. Now, if you take that section all the way to 2 52, um, those 30 odd verses, and you pulled it app, you would see that not only does that section hold together, coherently, but that everything before it and everything after it makes better sense without that.
So it, so that’s a process we call interpolation like this, this bit was kind of tossed in here and then it winds back and it moves forward. However, now, as sort of clear as that seems to be, if you wrap your head around, what’s going on on the text carefully enough, there’s just not enough historical evidence to actually make that argument. So the traditionalist won’t make that argument because they think if it’s all of a piece and would never, w wouldn’t in fact, they’re going to go on and tell you that it all comes from one hand and, you know, and Jesus really said this too.
They’re going to go through all of that, right? There’s there’s no, there’s no critical historical perspective on the material from the traditionalist. And the scholars are far too trepidatious to step in that mud pie. Because as soon as you, as soon as you wrote that you would be discredited for not having enough evidence to prove them, right?
So, um, scholarship almost in this subject, almost always err, on the side of caution. Um, and when that, when you turn that into history, it’s a very cautious place to go because the Indians don’t give us a lot to go. Um, you turn this back into the voices of traditionalist and all of this material becomes, um, pre interpreted according to the, the scholars, the traditionalist understanding, um, a better example of this, a better example of that idea, for example, would be, would be every translation of the great bug of a detail, which is a gateway test that every, all the sort of philosophical and visionary understandings in the Hindu tradition have to walk through the bug.
It would be like, eh, it’s, it’s standard fair. Wouldn’t matter what field logical side of the street you’re on, but any translation that is by Swami, somebody in Nanda is it wouldn’t matter which one it was, is already going to come from some or another point of view another because translation is interpretation.
And in this case it’s heavily redacted to that viewpoint. So, so, and then, then you, you kind of inch yourself over like flip the coin over to what we might call critical historical scholarship. And, and, um, you’re, you’re going to get a lot of, a lot of distance, a lot of, a lot of really very careful tip-toeing around the issues.
And then you folks, because there’s a market, as it were over the last 30 years for interest in this subject, there’s this, then there’s this sort of third body of material that comes from self-proclaimed amateur expert, poet people, or other sorts of people. And they’re just making shit up, you know, like they’re that, that, and what’s interesting is sometimes they’re making things up that are really interesting.
I mean, they’re not, they’re not without their creativities and their abilities. Don’t mistake. I’m not. Um, I love this Stephen Mitchell translation to the Bhagavad Gita, which just has nothing to do with the text.
Nothing it’s just nothing to do with it. It’s a beautiful work. It’s an interesting work to creative. Redactive kind of, it’s, it’s a really interesting thing to do. Just has nothing. Let me give you a better example of that, just so that you all know that I would say 98% of the time, you see anyone quoting the great Persian Sufi poet Rumi, they’re quoting from a translation from a Georgia English professor whose name is Coleman barks. Um, I worked with Coleman on other onset protects and talk about making shit up.
I mean, the reason you love Rumi is because Coleman’s really great. You’re really loving Coleman. That’s who you really love it because that’s not what it says. And he doesn’t read Persian. He doesn’t read Farsi. So he is somebody who kind of works out the Farsi form, word by word, and then he decides what he thinks it wants it.
And then, then if it doesn’t say what he wants it to say, he just makes it say what he wants it to say that, that shouldn’t disappoint you. That should tell you that, like, you know, that guy last week, um, in New York, uh, it’s just a major scandal in the New York art world because literally this little Chinese man who used to work on the street is really good at painting Rothkos. And Kavinsky this very famous, uh, art gallery just got busted selling them.
And I know a guy who works in that world who told me they had to know. So, so there are people who paid $30 million for this little tax guy. And what you get my reaction to that is he’s really good.
Like, okay, so you, you just got scammed, but nonetheless, um, he’s a really interesting guy. Let’s go back to the center. So, so who were these people and one of the most, and, and coming out of, of the rise of the ascetical tradition and remember that the aesthetics were, we’re committed to two things just to review very quickly.
The aesthetics were committed to, um, to the claim that the underutilized and cultivated human condition could be brought to an ecstatic fulmination that it could be, that there was in, there was truly for, for human possibility, a conclusion and, and they need, and they meant it to be conclusive. You don’t arise to the status of Buddha or CIT, uh, or, or any of the words for freedom look, deep milk Shaw.
And there’s there’s, there’s no backslide. There’s no like there’s no, like you don’t have another bad day.
That’s that’s not in the cards. So, so, oh, and all of those words are all those nominal words that are used are all grammatically passed. Passive participles, Buddha means awakened. It doesn’t mean in a process. It doesn’t mean an ongoing thing. It means done. And from which there is sort of, no, there is no backslash. So the first issue of these traditions was there is there is a culminating and conclusive goal that was brought about principally by the powers of introversion.
And that was their second great issue that you, that this was that this would not be found in the limited mortal and conditions terms of a changeable world. This would be found in a process of radical introversion. And when you go to say an early first century texts, like the Bhagavad Gita in the second chapter, when Krishna starts to talk about the yogans, that’s a very complicated topic right there, because he’s going to use that word more than 150 different forms.
And he’s gonna really use it to express a lot of different sorts of achievements and attainments and ideas and values. You know, that that text doesn’t really, that bug needs is probably first, second century before the Christian era. You know, there’s no tantra yet, again, because of the vocabulary. We don’t see any of the important words. We don’t have any notions. All of, all of the subtle body talk has nothing to do with chocolate has there’s no, no notion of Kundalini that the vocabulary that is endemic that’s, that’s the tantric world together just isn’t there.
And the conversation that it’s arising in is not from that world yet. You can just see, they haven’t really arrived there yet. It seems pretty conclusive. And then when you read commentaries that lead back into the text, that’s really creative. That’s really interesting stuff, but that’s, but that’s because it comes later and they walk because in the Indian tradition, what they want to see things there that may or may not have been there because they’ve already come philosophically with an interpretation of the text, no traditional commentator on the Bhagavad Gita or any other texts, pre tantric tantric texts doesn’t already have, as it were their worldview game set match, tightly knit together, all worked out.
They’re going to make that text, say what they want it to say, it’s oh, it is Sunday, praise the Lords. So, because it’s really no different than turning on of angelical TV in the morning, whatever they think that the tech, they already know what they want it to set. So they’re going to get it to say what they want it to say, no matter what it says, um, that’s going to be their task as, uh, and here’s an interesting term, scriptural interpreters, yoga scriptures. I can’t think of a more oxymoronic term because things aren’t written down for like script.
Those means to write, you don’t write this stuff down and they remember it. They memorize it. They talk about it like, but write it down. That’s a much, much later idea. Um, okay. So, so the ethos of the sort of underlying values of the aesthetics were that this exemptive state of realization, conferred power in the world, that when you were in the world, you were not only Teflon.
I mean, truly just exempt from its terms. You could, you had a certain kind of sovereignty over the world, and that’s why, that’s why they really call these Raja yogas because they’re alternative forms of sovereignty and that notion of sovereignty over body over mind, over speech dominion over the world is, is, is more than a control issue. It’s it’s, it’s uh, because they, there’s a, there’s a kind of irony to it.
They have, they have complete management over it, but don’t want anything to do with it. They could do anything in the world, but choose not to.
The term control, use more on a personal sense as opposed to a controlled.
Well, but, but control creates control. There’s no doubt about that. The earliest, the earliest traditions way before the tantra are telling me that when you arrive at these exalted states, as you move through this sort of this, let me remember the, the eight limbs are a vertical, right? You start at the bottle and as you achieve, you can kick away the rungs of the ladder because you have already been there, done that. And once you arrive in the states of the subtle body, that’s me or banality.
And because, because they are really working from, from a bondage to liberation, gross to subtle model of the world, that’s how they’re orienting their work. So, so, so they, they do mean control, controlling oneself, confers control over the world. It’s very hard not to read that into the way they orient themselves. Why don’t you just take that out?
And I’ll be like, okay, that’s good. We’re good to take it all the way out. I’ll be really happy. I have to hear a story. So I used to have to race from Harvard yard, back to the divinity school to go to this great class, which is lovely, man. Um, who was the most shy and retiring and, and introverted arc kind of stereotype of a scholar you’ve ever met. Like he was, he was so sweet.
He was such a mole. Like he had to pull up, his little glasses could barely Mo mumble past the podium, but he really always had something interesting to say. So there were two doors into this classroom and I was late, never late as late. I came in the back door and I sat down I’m squinting. And the guy next to me, he goes, you know, I said, I realized that I couldn’t see anymore, but the kid in the front row was like an Elvis Costello lookalike without the irony.
Like he, like, he had the pocket protector in the high waters and the, and his jacket was the same one he wore every day. And his lunch was on his tie. The jacket would sit over there. I’m outside of the room sometimes, and then went back over to him. But he was a piece of work. And in Boston, they’re called grinders, you know, like submarine sandwiches and it had cellophane on it. Right. So, so yeah, so crinkle that for, we need to close out of it while, while he consumed his grinder, Beldock cone had stopped, is straight straight, and it’s going like really loud.
And by now I’m laughing because professor karma is just like, and in the 11th century. So anytime this happens, I have like, I have like my LSD John Carmen flashback to the moment where, okay, sorry. So now yes,.
No, if actually people achieve this, like some organization look at George’s guide or is this just a myth that people expect to? I mean, I,.
Well, all mythological mythologies are real. The question is, in what way, they’re real. I’m going to go there. Um, I do like to tell the story of, well, let me just keep going and I’ll answer. So, but one of the things that’s arising here in the early centuries, especially out of these charismatics is the notion that this liberative state, which now is, is, is the immortal not only confers power in the world and dominion in a certain dominion over the world, not only confers authority, as well as exemption from, from everyday terms.
One of the things that it fundamentally exempts from is, is we, we get, we get a notion. We, it quickly turns the tides towards physical alchemy, so that what begins as the spirit is liberated and the mat and matter goes on, right? And the Buddhist do an excellent job of describing this.
He arrives at the completion of Nirvana at 35 or 36 he’s Hey, I said, he has a distinguished 50 year career of teaching and conversation. He has a very bad night with a begging bowl from China of a Smith at age 82. And he steps into what the Buddhist called party Nirvana. So the distinction between Nirvana and Pari Nirvana, is it euphemism in the Buddhist tradition to talking about how the liberated and exempted state of the awakened one moves from life to death.
Pardon Nevada means his body has gone, but he wasn’t really in it. Certainly he hasn’t really been here subject to the terms of mortality for the last 50 years anyway, because all because literally he has arrived, Nirvana would be the extinction of suffering to what exactly it entails that for 50 years, he has to eat and sleep and carry on and probably has a couple of bad days.
Um, all of that is, is, is thrown up into the maelstrom of possibilities, but it, by the first century or so, we’re getting it, we’re getting a different, we’re getting a different sense of what it would mean to be in complete dominion over the, that the arrival at the immortal is becomes dominion over the mortal. There. They really begin to talk about, um, this is also the first elaboration, the first distinction of ire of Veda, right?
They’re not just looking to heal and create healing, palliative remedies to the human circumstance of suffering there. They’re looking for, I wish the word I an IO and I are Veda means longevity. And now they mean maybe a lot of longevity, maybe a lot, a lot of longevity to maybe Lord Voldemort, like longevity, meaning they’re looking for the source of her stone.
They’re looking for physical immortality and the vac.
And there’s a very important and powerful strain in the origins of tantra that is looking to literally transmute take the human condition to that place where physical death is simply no longer the outcome you would reverse the process it’s going to be now. Let’s, let’s pause on that idea just to explain how they thought they could. They could arrive at that. And we’ll go back to Judy’s question. Like you got like the two that you gotta be kidding anything.
Right. Okay. Cause that’s your mic. One of the things that I think has always served me well as a student of yoga and being a native of this soil, um, for the five greatest taunted scholars in the world, I know all are from New Jersey. We all drank the water. We are all the chemical results of this land. Is that the first words out of my mouth as a child where you gotta be kidding me.
I think I said it when I was two and only underwent one upgrade to you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Okay. That’s all, that’s the only thing that ever happened to that idea. So, but here’s the idea. And that is that the principle that is the immortal salt, ideological is not an evolution of the world. It’s an assumption of reality. The thing that makes us the reality that animates us and the cashmere Shai bites come along and make this very clear that they want to call Chitta.
All the words for consciousness. This is they, the claim is that we, as conscious beings are the evidentiary proof that consciousness in some sublime and incipient sense, preexists our experience of it.
Let me put it in a simpler way. Weird let’s fast forward to the ninth century cashmere shots to make the point very clear. We are the proof that the world is consciousness because we couldn’t be conscious beings unless there was consciousness, unless some kind of principle of consciousness, pervaded, adhered, suffused reality itself. Now there’s a lot of interesting contemporary philosophy about this stuff. Kind of Thomas Nagel writes about this and others, um, planned and gun Nagle.
There’s a lot of conversation about this among those who are not arguing for a God principle, but for the I, but, but against the Neo Darwinist who are arguing that consciousness is a, is an evolution of material reduction. So we want to understand what I mean by that. In other words, 3.8 billion years ago, there was a, there was a soupy concoction of material entities and the replicative recursive process that is life happened as a chemical reaction.
That’s where Neo Darwinism goes. That’s where most of the argument arrives in the west these days as to how life happened. What was life? Life was a chemical reaction. It’s a little brutal, but it’s probably okay. Like everything. We know points to that. Being the case now enter the Indian world because this is a really important point when the system that sits next to som Pia before Contra the autism that sits next to yoga before townships called song queue, the word Saki means to enumerate.
It means to count. And these are the folks who gave us the so-called 24 categories, the 24 principles, they called tucked lives, who were in touch with me that miss the Ruddock, the reductive principle, that that explains the process of experience. Now here’s the most important thing to know about song. It starts in it. Matt let’s bet words starts, it maps from a material reality through these categories that are then cycle are really ways of, of explaining how we human beings understand the world.
So the categories that Sonka is mapping these 24 principles from, from the, from the gross to the sublime, from the ordinary to, to self-aware cognitive self-expression that process that they’re mapping is always because they’re Indians always a process of understanding human perception. So these aren’t material categories, these are categories about the world. These are categories about perception. That’s my point.
So he’s explaining how we as human beings create our world the way they do that is they say, we start in elemental material reality. We start Wade that we start down there and then, and then they count up through the process of perception and the last three categories. When you, when you, when you get to the top of their, their ladder, right? Our mind ego and judgment minus minus a hundred power of the D they call it, it’s a very famous and the the capacity to choose.
The word would be here to the word, all meaning awakening, right? Buddhi is the capacity in these systems to, to be discerning. It’s the ability to know that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s that, it’s the process of as a practical process for the, as judgment as a cognitive process, it’s discrimination, it’s the sorting ability of a mind. It goes past your preferences, through the circulation of your brain, which is what they mean by the word Mahnaz here all the way to this status of awareness.
So would these awareness judgment discernment, the sorting power? It’s the cognitive pal, and here’s the most important point in Sonka and that is it’s entirely a material evil.
It’s just a F and in that sense, full pause Sonka is right. Exactly where contemporary, Neo Darwinism that is, we arrive at the evolution of our own. Self-awareness about what about having a mind through which all the senses and material processes are filtered, right? That creates a sense of identity, right? Ego identity. So ego identity, the mind filter, all of this sort of floats to the top of the awareness spirit.
And that’s the 24th category of these 25. Hmm. Is everybody clear about how this works? And so, and so, and so what we are, and here’s the critical point because discernment awareness, criticality, let’s call it this criticality or something like that. Judgment is the process that maps change. I knew, I didn’t know. Right. I got it. I didn’t get it. It belongs to the mutable world. It’s just like all other things that change.
This is genius too. They really understood that. Changing your mind, such as it is, puts you in a mortal conditional world, it puts you there. And so they’re defining human experience up until this point as a process of layering, a hierarchy of being from material things to more subtle self experiences. Right? And so when you finally arrive at the experience, not just the mechanisms of the experiencer, right?
Sankey does a brilliant thing. It maps you back. It solves, it means to solve what we in the west called the Cartesian problem. The, I think, therefore I am guy, right? Which says, we talked a little bit about this yesterday, that the experience or the one having the experience is not the thing, making the experience. It’s exactly the it’s exactly what split our psych department in the eighties into two completely different things. In fact, they hate each other so much.
They built a wall seriously. That’s how, because the one side of all the brain and Cox side people, they don’t, everything we’re thinking is a protein. Like it’s all just neurons and shit, right? Because, because that’s what they’re doing, because they want to explain everything through the material reductive process. But then, but then that you’re having an experience like I like blue or isn’t my owl cue. Right? All of that is completely separated out from the thing that’s making.
You see the experience, right? So your brain and cognitive function is not the same thing as your experience are we in the west? And the Indians knew this too. Everybody knows this. They know that the machine that’s running you is hack is, has a ghost in the machine. Sankey has claim. If they, what was it? The ghost in the machine is no different than the materiality.
It’s just an, it’s just another way in which the materiality appears. It’s just a higher evolution. That is an incredibly modern, sophisticated idea. That’s where the Neo Darwin’s Darwinians wanna go. They want to go. Really this thing you call consciousness is a process of matter. That is really just a very nuanced, sophisticated, complex, evil of, of the very same stuff. The very same dust that’s dust. So the experience or inside the water chemical thing, that’s your brain is really just more water and chemicals.
It’s really up the same order. Enter and enter yoga. Yoga said, yes, but there’s one more category. There’s a 25th category. And that’s the ghost. That’s, Perusha that spirit. That’s the real ghost to the machine. That’s the experiencer of the machine that makes the experience, but they never abandon yoga. So yoga adds this category, but, and then they give you a really then yoga takes a really interesting, like now they’re really got a tango because I got two things right now.
They’ve got somebody else at the dance. We talked a little bit about this yesterday, but think about it. They, what they’ve really managed to do is tell you this, that your soul is different than your experience of change, because remember they didn’t abandon those other Songkick categories. You have a mind, and then you have a preference maker that identifies your mind as you write. So you have, you have a mind, then you have an ego, and then you have this thing that kind of knows that it’s aware those are the, those are the so-called subtle body, right?
When you work to the subtle body sunk, you said you’re still working in the material mortal world of changeability, yoga ads and potential as yoga Sutra assumes, you know, this adds this next category, which is called Perusha spirit and says, oh no, there’s a part of you that is immutable, changeless, unconditioned, and undergoes, no process whatsoever. It is the immortal self Supreme conscious. Yes. And, and that Supreme consciousness inhabits and, and pervades all things.
So that explains reincarnation. What happens, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, because the matter goes this way and the self just carries on. And then the self Rayanne cases itself in this, in wrapped process.
Now it’s actually way more complicated than that, right? Hang on with me, bear with me. I’ll make, I’ll try to make this clarity. So this is the mop. Now Sonka yoga refers to these, these two systems working together. If, if Sonka had carried the debt, we wouldn’t have had this assertion, this claim that there is this other thing that inhabits our consciousness is consciousness. We would have, we would have had an argument that th that what you’re experiencing is changeable consciousness is really all the risks.
And that that’s really just a process of the very same material, reckoning of all things. But som you got itself in trouble and, and late itself, bear to yoga’s claim that there was this other reality, this true spirit, this immortal self, which would also then be the divine self and the trouble they got in was this, instead of seeing that process of arriving at consciousness as a material evolution, which is our view, right?
That is time created consciousness in that gradual 3.8 billion years, over the last 4.2 billion in a 13.8 billion year, cosmos so far what we know, right? We see consciousness as an evolution of a, of a gradual process of development that is consciousness as an outcome full stop. India saw consciousness as a premise, not as an outcome that is, they saw even sunk.
You thinks that the experience we’re having that the universe must have possessed all these categories for us to possess any of them. So they’re not working from a gross world, created a subtle experience. They’re working from the idea that a subtle reality was always present. And so they can either see it. You can see it as a devolution. There was consciousness and it goes down to matter, or they can see matter becomes consciousness because consciousness was always here because they’re working on a very simple plan, which is the things can’t come in to be th that the changeable process must be preceded by its possibility by its incipient presence.
There’s a technical term for this. And it’s very important for understanding Indian philosophy. Do you want me to give it to you? I will. Anyway, it’s a little technical. It’s called K R Y a Vada. VHDA now the word Vata take you all the way to the word word. So it’s what it means. So Vata means doctrine or idea. It’s the word of the, that the, that the, that the car is sucked. That is that the effect that the co that the effect is present, what they mean by that is that the effect is preexistent in the costs. Let me give you a sec.
Let me give you their standard example. The reason wood burns to fire is because fire is latent as a possibility in wood, right? And that, so Saki is going to argue that life consciousness is, is, is the sublime latent reality inherent in the material world, because it couldn’t come about.
If it weren’t already, incipiently potentially there, it’s a potency latency argument. Got it. That you can’t make things out of things that, that don’t have that possibility in that. That’s not a crazy way to think. One second contemporary physics says, look, if the universe were, as we understood it, where is it? W if it were a degree warmer or a degree cooler, it wouldn’t have turned out the way it is. It’s the whole Goldilocks idea part, not too hot, not too cold.
And so the possibilities of evolution have to be, there has to be enough carbon. There has to be enough stress to be enough of what there is to make us possible to happen. The Indians are thinking exactly the same way, but one of the blue that sounded like me, that’s really what else can I tell you? A ball, all the CDs and recordings and whatever it is. I’ve never watched myself on yoga glow. I cannot stand the thought of listening to my own voice. I congratulate and welcome any of you to do that. Um, there is a mild underground in like grateful dead tapes.
I’ll try it. I’ll trade you. The metal lands for Quinn Delaney.
But they went through this process where instead of seeing consciousness as a, as an outcome, they saw it as a premise, as, as something that had to be there that in fact may not be correct from what we understand today about reality, but that’s how they organize their world now, but they accomplished something very interesting. They wanted to tell you that almost all the ways in which you imagine yourself as a person, in fact, all the ways you imagine yourself as a person are not the real you.
Now I add Yoda right there. Just this material part of you, you’re still confusing and conflating your mind, your ego preferencing, and your awareness principle with yourself. Whereas the self is really of a different order of being, because it doesn’t change. It is immortal. It isn’t mortal. It has never undergone a process. Now that model holds fast from the first century for the only thing that’s going to happen to this 24 plus one material categories, add the self or what we would call property and Parisian.
The only thing that’s going to happen in that model, is it going to add to it? The tantrums are going to come along and just to make things easier. They’re going to add 11 more categories on top of Parisian. They’re going to go from 25 to 36. And if you want to go way down the rabbit hole of the study of tantra, this is where you start to go to explain how they go about explaining the world. And this is what’s called tequila theory and anyone who wants a whole course on touch with theory, um, come see me.
I’ve got one and I can, I can pass it along. Okay. So, and it’s a, it’s a whole kind of, and what they’re really doing is they’re trying to map the experience of experience. That’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to take what it is we call experience and create a higher, uh, way of, of literally of bringing it all the way down to the most material level. And then creating a pattern that lets you say, this, everything, everything in the material category is changeable and what makes self Perusha spirit different is that it has never changed.
It has always been the same. The reason for that then is there has, because they’re thinking there has to be a source for the experience itself.
It’s like arguing with the feast, like, well, where did the universe come from? It’s an argument for first principle. A lot of that is peeling away and our contemporary understandings about how things work. Um, but that’s where they’re going. You know, you want a piece of this. Okay? So, so the alchemist’s interest is powerful here. The first interest in iron Veda was, was, well, life is precarious and threatening and dangerous.
The path to awakening is, is fraught with, with often they were, spinosa all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, right? They understood that. And life was short and you got them. Remember, this is India a long time ago. What’s life expectancy 30, right? If you make the cut, although India has always been a very fecund and resourceful place. Now people have, we have lots of evidence that people live long.
However, um, that what, what causes death is, is entropy is the very notion that the animating force is one mistake. You don’t even know it’s there. You don’t really know what the source of your consciousness is. You don’t know your soul, which is the true source and cause of animating your physical reality.
But your physical reality is, is also subject to the terms of mutability to the terms of change. It is itself and Tropic, right? The powerful world moves from Tropic as a simple idea, Ms. From order to disorder creation is an unraveling. It’s a devolving, it’s a falling apart. And, and it, and because no matter how hard you try to keep things to save the same, they change no matter how much you want them to change, they won’t. So you’re fundamentally dissatisfied with the condition of change, but change is entropy in the Indian mind, you know, and it’s the dust funny principle, right?
You don’t even have to do anything just don’t vacuum for awhile and they’re under your bed, right? Like you didn’t have to do anything to accumulate a mess, leave things unattended. And they fall apart. Right? So the, the, the ordinary direction of materiality is from order to disorder. They also understood that every moment of disorder is as orderly as it was going to be. Right. Do you understand what I mean by this spill the water in the, in the bottle more orderly, right?
Why many variables? Trillions of molecules helped me out. Elizabeth, trying to make me not sound stupid here. As I spill the water, right? The problem is getting it back in the bottle, right? Because it’s, but it’s really an order problem. All of this is too complex, too many variables to get it back. But once it’s spill, the only thing it can do next is get more entropic, get it at every moment. It’s perfectly orderly, but it could be more and less orderly with respect to different moments.
Once I spill it, think about this, right? That’s the, that’s the most orderly it’s going to be the next thing it’s going to do after that, it’s just get worse. Right? So the Indian mind also sees time and place and identity in this model. And Murphy is an optimist, right? So that when things go wrong, they go really can wrong. So the reason we die is that we’re in a process in which the life force literally kind of peaks and trembles.
And then, and then declines the rise of alchemy in the model of now Sonka yoga has two agendas and they’re linked together. The first agenda is realize the immortal part of yourself and you gain dominion over the material to the point where the management of the material reverses the process of entropy.
It literally stops it inhibits delays and reverses, essentially the March to death. And this is why Indian mythology and the history of yoga talks about yogis being hundreds, thousands of years old, once you get the big Kaboom is supposed to be a big Kaboom. You’re your inner Marvin Martian. Where’s the caboose. There’s supposed to be an earth shattering frame, sorry.
I really have a casualty of rock and roll in cartoons.
Once you get the big Kaboom. Once you realize that the immortal that the power of the immortal self now, as the alchemists get hold of this idea informs the mortal world. The dissipation of the life force no longer follows suit because you, you identify with this part of yourself. That is the consciousness that has always been Willow. It is in you, and will always be once that consciousness identity is, as it were secured, by the way, in which it is no longer ident misconstrued with the contingency of the awareness consciousness, the material thing that’s changeable and entropic you gain control over that.
Enter the outcomes. The basic old trope is realized beings live for centuries. Why? Because they control the entropic process of the material world. They’re no longer subject to it.
So every story tells you, you know, go to the great Mahara the ASA, the great ascetic Yogi. Who’s not really all that aesthetic since he’s the progenitor of the race. He’s tell me the Mahabharata story for generations after everyone. Else’s dad, he’s literally telling the, the old saw of the epic is that Viansa shows up at the, at a ritual sacrifice of a king. Who’s the great, great, great grandson of the last pond of a, of a war.
And he says, well, who are my ancestors? And tell us our story. This would make the ASA several hundred years old, right? And everyone goes, right. So this isn’t simply an album. This sort of ethos of alchemy is everywhere in the Indian tradition. This is what I’ve been trying. This is, this is why this 20 minutes is worth having, right? So while it’s going to get really interestingly wacky, when we turn it in, when the Thompson he goes, get ahold of it, very large Baltimore D the idea that, that realization, however, that’s variously defined confers dominion in a world in which its terms cannot only be subjugated and control, but the very processes in which you’re in can be, can be simulated.
They can be reversed. They can be rigid. They can simply be no longer apply for full Pauls. So why do we die? We die because the process of life, as it materially distills within us dissipates the process of perfect replication fails. This is Indian genius. They re they understood why we failed. That is why we age, why we dis-ease and why we die. And that’s because we don’t replace ourselves perfectly with ourselves.
I stay water understands this, okay. There D wrinkling you on these very principles. What’s that? Oh, there’s all kinds of other explanations about catastrophic death, sudden death, bad. That’s all karma. Karma is the catch-all answer for any of anything else. That’s just bad karma. That’s like, you got cut off by a prophet. Literally you were sort of born with way too much viability.
You didn’t even get a chance because you’re inherited.
Cause the other thing, and this again, is very contemporary. This is not a silly thing to think. You were, you were, you came into the world pre imprinted with, with uncountable generational identities. Now, if you just, if you simply go to the DNA argument of our own of our own era, this is death and rebirth is not a completely silly idea. All of your ancestors are Indian. You were the, you were the consequences of every last bit, right. Of those connections, which means that some way down there, you know, you could have a Woody ARVO crop.
Understand what I mean by that? Woody Guthrie died of Huntington’s Huntington’s disease, right? And, and Arlo, everybody knows who Woody Guthrie is. The youngsters don’t know you dealt with this land is your land honey. So we will make sure you understand who this folk singer song writer was. And, and, and his son would, uh, would take you out to Alice’s restaurant where he can get anything you want.
Okay?
Yes. That’s the point of Woody and ROS. ROS is, is that we now know that Huntington’s disease is on the Y chromosome and manifests in middle age and Arla didn’t know he was going to get it. Like he had to pass a certain threshold in his life because it was cause he could have gotten just died when his father died. We now know it’s an inherited disease. I’m answering your question, which is that how come some people make it? And some people don’t.
And the Indian answer is karma and karma is causality. Karma is the inheritance of probabilities. That’s what they think it is. Karma is very simple. It’s it’s cause Allity probability and consequence. It’s an explanation of cause and effect and cause, and effect is cumulative. Again, this is not fanciful silly thinking. This is, this is observational. This is powerful. Empirical observation.
We’ve got ways of thinking about karma now that are exactly what we would call karma. Like it wasn’t Arlo’s karma to get that recessive gene. That’s a way we would put it now, but that’s karma. It’s that’s not to conflating a notion. I’m not really just saying they didn’t really understand the mechanisms of hereditary heredity any more than we did. Okay. Let’s stop for ourselves. But they did understand cumulative costs out the collection of consequences. If you don’t make the cut or you get cut off or you get an accident, something awful happens to you one way or another.
The Indian explanation is there’s an imprint for that. Now there’s a lot. We’ll go to this much later on in the day, um, because the Indians really get themselves. As soon as you take this line, you have to remember that these are traditions. These are wisdom, traditions, they’re traditions and wisdom.
Traditions rely upon accountability and intelligibility. They want to look out at the world and they want to say, what’s mysterious to you. It’s not mysterious to those who know, right? Because they’re working on an intelligibility principle, the world isn’t simply occluded an office, skated the theist, go to big mystery. The yogis go, no mystery is just dense. The thing about a mystery is it solvable. The solvability principle means that you could figure it out.
If you can figure it out. There’s a reason for things. If there’s the reason for things is called karma. So when someone says to you, everything happens for a reason. Let me translate for you. Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma. That’s what they just said. Okay. Now the problem with that, there’s a problem. When you get into a world that’s not only intelligible and figure out-able it’s, it’s determinative. That is where now wise your choices and your possibilities.
If in fact what you’ve inherited is everything that could possibly happen. And by the way, it’s all kind of going to work out that way because all of these causes and effects because they are because it’s so, so think of it this way. Think of it. If, if, if, if cause allergies too tightly woven together, you’re you don’t have any choices, get it because this is going to happen. And now you get into all the words for fate and destiny and determination. One way out of that is to say, everything happens for a reason, pause, comma, because God has a plan.
Now you’re a theist. Got it. Don’t add the other clause. And you’re still in the yoga world, right? Of self-determination. But the question is how self-determining are you in a world in which everything that you can be has in some sense already been accumulated.
If what you’re only, if what you’re doing is only realizing what the potencies are, you’ve inherited, then what kind of choices do you have? These are the sorts of things. Indian philosophers think about because of karmic, determinism. And so the contrast is how are you free? Think of it this way, it’s fixed and free, right? The more you fix the world, the more explanation you can give, but you get, but the more you fix it, the less freedom you have, the more free it is, the more you’ve got to go, okay, how come it’s not?
So fixed the less, the less predictability you have because predictability is fixed ability. Get it like we live here. The fix is in meaning, you know, what’s already going to happen, right? That’s a literate. That’s exactly what I mean by the fix. A fixed world is one where the, the outcomes are determining the odds of already spoken. Think of it that way.
So, so the alchemists come along and they say, what is the F what, what, why is it you disease and die? And their answer again, begins insanity. Now in incentive, it begins the same. That’s what I want to say. It begins saying. And they, what they understand is the process of human life begins to fail.
They didn’t quite understand that it really is replica to failure. we don’t, we don’t replace ourselves perfectly with ourselves. We age, we grow old and then we die. Why? Because the process break, because the process breaks down. That’s the first thing they said. That is actually totally true. They got that completely. Right. That’s what we understand the process breaks down. But notice the other thing about, about human life.
And they noticed this, that we are here, not simply to replicate ourselves, but to replicate. That is to say, because the genius of human birth, you know, the way, you know, you’re you, you’ve the way, you know, you’ve made it is that you’re here again.
If human humanoids are, are 2 million, a million plus years around every, every one of your ancestors survived to replicate everyone reproduced every single one. Right? That’s huge. That’s like you made the cut. Okay. And the Indian mind says, you’re here making the cut. Now enter Ayurveda’s early understandings because they don’t really understand how babies are made.
They don’t, they never understand how babies are made. That’s that’s a fact, okay. They don’t really, they don’t get the sperm ovum thing. We didn’t know that until very recently, ancient India never knew this. They knew, they knew they knew a lot about sexual fluid. Okay. Cause we all do. Okay. So, but they didn’t know how they didn’t know how the mechanism worked, but this is what they did know that they, this is what they thought. They thought that the reason you’re here is to do that, that everything your physical body wants to do is devoted to that.
They are perilously close to the brilliant Dawkins argument of the selfish gene. You’re not, you think you’re here for you, your genes. No. You’re here for them. Probably one of the most important books of the 20th century read Richard Dawkins, selfish gene. It’s a, if he really isn’t telling you were selfish, he’s really telling you that survival comes through through the distillation of a replicative process, that our bodies are devoted to that the selfish gene, it’s really an amazing book because he isn’t tough.
He people have so misused, this idea like it’s, it’s made him sound like, you know, there’s no altruism. There’s no goodness in the world. He’s actually telling you. No, no, no. The mechanism of your body is devoted to its survival. That’s all it wants. It doesn’t even want that by wanting that. That’s what it does. That’s every last bit.
That’s the old, your life has only one agenda again. It’s its only message. So the only thing it does, it goes again, it would prefer again exactly how it just did itself. It isn’t looking for change or development. It wants again, it wants to reproduce itself exactly the way it did. How does it explain purchase then? It doesn’t oh, much later on. We can explain purpose. But, but what, but what this suggests is that it doesn’t need a purpose because it, because it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to have a purpose.
All it has to have is a process. And all that process does is say again. Yeah. Here’s where the Indians enter into the conversation in an interesting way. They think all the food, all the air, everything you do as a manifest physical embodied beef is devoted to making that energy of replication. Your whole body is a distillation of food to the principle they call OGs, which is the essential gooey distillation of the life force, the physical manifestation of which our sexual fluids, the subtle manifestation of which is life itself.
They really understood that sexual fluid with now the conflict they didn’t know about ovums and eggs and women. And then they quit doing anatomy very early on because of cast. So one of the reasons why medicine and iron Aveda in India fails to carry on and really become what it might’ve been is because much of it has to do with purity and danger issues associated with cast and gender. They stop almost all the, almost all of the good evolutions of medicine happened in Buddhist communities.
Up until around the second century, when Buddhism also becomes saturated with priest Braben class converts, priestly cast converts, um, they enter these monasteries where, where they give up name and family and they become, as it were characters of the community whose efforts are to relieve the sufferings of Senti and beings. Medicine evolves in those places. But it, it starts to die out in the ordinary real world because there’s permissions and prohibitions about human contact, the area, diet learning, custodians of wisdom, the upper CAS who are carrying on Sanskrit, stop touching.
People’s everybody clear about that. One of the reasons that subtle body anatomy comes about chuckers and the rest is because they have no idea what’s inside you. They wouldn’t touch it. They wouldn’t open you up. They wouldn’t look right. That’s like icky. That’s a here, not their problem. That’s purity endanger problem. In, in, in casts, India, you’re cremated within 24 hours of your death, right? They have no idea what’s going on.
I am making a pretty audacious claim. She has a lot of subtle body theory is ignorance. They’re imagining what’s going on. Cause they never look. They stop looking right around the first century. That’s a fact. Now what else? That’s a little reductive because I don’t think that’s why they come up with subtle body theory. But I think that they do stuff, but we do know they stop looking. Okay. Well what they do think, and this is really interesting is that everything you’re breathing and doing is distilling to Otis, right?
Which is actually not a terribly ignorant way of thinking. Like if you think about it, you go, wow, you grow up to reproduce. Like it’s the selfish gene argument. And, and when you kind of tip the scales and you’ll get past your expiration dates and you don’t really do that anymore. Um, what you’re really witnessing is the dissipation of OGs. And there’s a whole industry devoted to that now. Right. And, and now think about, so when your OGs is connected to your, your, your set, your, your virility literally, right.
And you use that word Crossgender because the word Vira, which is the Sanskrit word for heroic, right. Is directly cognate to the English word virility. Okay. To be Vira is to be Viro. That is to be able to take the life force, which, which on the one hand distills to your essence, like what’s your physical body distilling to like, like take it from this cast to that cask, that cast. And like, it’s like, it’s like branding.
It’s like all the way down to like the really good stuff. And you’re kind of a fundamentally, a single ball at the bottom. Like you go all the way down to that. But so at the bottom of my being is probably Groppe up.
Everybody know what Rapa is it’s made from like the drags and glutes. Fantastic. It’s like wider fluid. It’s 200% alcohol, you know? So go ahead. How they explained increased population. Oh, you mean like the conservation of solves problem? Um, can I promise, I’ll answer that and keep going. But the short answer is there are plenty of songs you aren’t seeing. Okay.
So you don’t have to just get them from here. Plus the souls are really fractal realizations of soul, not in the James Brown sense, but in the, but the essential sense of there is a soul and the soul that you and have, it is simply a fusion of this principle of Perusha of salt what’s that right? Right, right, right. Because we all have this. We’re also fused with the same soul. It is as words with a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused so God puts.
What’s the meaning of infertility or the.
Aha. Well, you can. Ah, so, so the ascetic path, isn’t simply a refusal to participate in the world. It’s the reversal of the, of the, of the Viro energies. In other words, think about it that, uh, let me, let me be crass and put it simply when you release the fecund energies, you give up, you give up some of your life and you make end. And in a householder sense, you make more depth.
When you make children, you, you, you advance the entropic process. You you’re not making more life, you’re making more death, right? Because all of those things you bring into the world they’ll die too, right? Unless the process stops going in that direction and then reverses the direction. Now you’re at the heart of the Indian alchemical notion that reversal direction begins with the rise of the ACETA tradition, which is so they’re not, they’re not claiming they’re not using celibacy as a moral category right now.
Celibacy is a moral. Does everyone understand what I mean by that? Celibacy is a moral category is I don’t share my sensuality, these which make, which gives me the ability to treat every, to create, create exactly the same boundary with everyone. Because, because intimacy is about Andriy of, of self-imposed bias. Does everybody understand what I mean by that? When you, when you, when you’re intimate with someone, you’re not only share your stuff, you share it with them and not with everyone else.
So celibacy as a moral category, it’s the Catholic church arguing, right? Why are the priests celibate so that they can love everyone and they aren’t distracted into other love, but they’re not biasing their love, right? Because intimacy is a biased of up that celibacy is a moral argument, right? And he doesn’t make the moral argument about celibacy. The celibacy argument is fundamentally stop relinquishing your power to a world. That’s consuming the fundamental distillation of your power.
Is it everything your body is making? It’s distilling to OGs. It’s distilling sexual power. Sexual power is the fundamental distillation. It’s the grampa at the bottom of your barrel, right? Everything you’re doing is making that. And it’s devoted to that.
All the food, all the breath, everything else. And you are literally a leaky vessel. This is where pranayama and Bundas are invented. They are invented to create occlusions, to stop the leaking vessel. They’re not to feel good. They’re not to do. They’re not. They’re not because they give you the reason they give you health is they stopped. They stopped the products from exiting and the products re can be re are, are what’s in the OGs.
Your OGs is leaking product and that’s what’s causing you to die now.
Oh yeah, because yeah, they’re pretty lost. But do remember that this is a civilization that gave us the Kama Sutra and plenty of tantra later on. So fraught with this is, this is, this is among the most misogynist and sexist civilizations ever to invent itself. And it’s the only continuous macro historical tradition with goddesses and heroines.
Look for heroines in Western mythology. They are, do not exist. Almost impossible. You have STDs, where’d he go India. And he’s got millions of, and we’ll go back to all of these. This is, these are ironies. These are contradictions paradoxes. We could embrace. But you know, the only goddess tradition is misogynist. The only heroine tradition is sexist. We’ll figure. Okay. Uh, I’ll say nothing to home. A folk who would think otherwise, oh yeah, they’re fucked up.
And in an interesting way, my own teacher, one of the more astonishing things about some MRT was that he crusaded against physicians when he paused for a second. This is a commercial interruption. When he invites me to live in his house, when I’m 20 years old, this is, this is a socio-political risk in his community. That is a grim, it’s a flagrant political decision to have the foreigner, the white kid, right?
When he’s got daughters and nieces who are my age or younger living in the house in, in a, in a, in, and he comes from the most Orthodox south Indian Brahmin, priestly cats. It was not uncommon in that house for, and his brother-in-law. We live in two houses next to each other in a single compound. His brother-in-law next door is to put, oh, he’s a ton sherd priest, right? He’s not only a ground. He’s got the haircut.
He wears the three things. He’s a professional Vedic priest. And three times a week, there’s a full on Vedic fire ceremony next door with a posse. Oh, gaggles of brevis right. And there are some days where they’re doing these events, these proxy rituals for their clients who may not even be there. And definitely there are whole days where the subtext of the house is please try not to be seen. It would be too awkward for everyone in the house.
And yet everyone knows I live in the house and all of the Grammys are completely wiped out. The completely terrified and freaked out by this abomination of, of the Malecha the barbarian foreigner. That’s a great word, incense. You know, the word barbarian comes to us in English, from the Greek, from those who couldn’t speak Greek, go Baba, Baba, Baba. They can’t speak properly. That’s why they’re barbarians. It’s going to really what the word means in Sanskrit.
There’s only one word that begins M L E and it’s Malecha. And it’s because the barbarians go, they can’t speak. They can’t speak either. They can’t speak Saska. So the Malecha lives next, you know, lives in the house. Here’s a great thing. So this is a very sweet part of the story. Many of you know this, so up as mother was the most Orthodox Brandman widow. She had lost her husband when he was nine months old, somewhere in her, early thirties.
And then she shaved her head, wears a nine yard. Safwan sorry, never wears the auspicious. Marx never attends another auspicious, which never goes to another wedding, much less ever remarry. The plight of an Orthodox widow was off and upper wasn’t was completely betwixt in between about this. He, he hated this, but he wasn’t going to tell his mother not to do it. Cause that’s his mother. This was her customs, her traditions. But every time this subject would come up, I would look at me and he would say never again in our house, but this is the kind of, and she was the matriarch.
I mean, she ran the whole house. My potty was the boss. She waited on the, uh, and she came to love me so much. He was so sweet. She would sit on the steps and she would play a little counting game.
You know that, um, we call it CASI and Timo, you know, with the shells, she was, she was genius at it. She was like 80. When I met her, she was in her eighties. She died at 97 or 98. And so, but she would wait for me and scold me if I was late. And she was amazing. So, and it was her job. So in our house, they would make the food for the gremlins who would be next door doing this big fire ritual. And that they, they started 4, 3 30, 4 o’clock in the morning. They chat all the way until noon, somewhere around one.
O’clock they’re going to come over for lunch. And you could hear potty all morning, like muttering under her breath because she not only didn’t like those guys, she didn’t like that. I was being treated badly. So then the layout, the banana leaves to feed the Brandon’s.
Cause the end of the ritual is feed the Brahmins. And she would call me downstairs and sit me at the head of the table, such as it is on the floor. And as she was dishing out the rice on my leaf before any of those guys arrived, she was like, you were the only brown man in this house. All of them they’re just so corrupt. All they came for is the money. They don’t really live. They don’t really live a true life and she’d be muttering under her breath and tallow. Now, if those guys next door, you, that she had fed me in that house from the food that they were going to eat, they would be like, apoplectic catalepsy would have fallen out of their ears.
Like they can just completely freak out. So on the one hand we lived in this utterly Orthodox rigorous environment of rules and customs and values.
And on the other hand, they were revolutionaries of, of such sobriety and generosity that it’s inexplicably. When I explained to super Orthodox pendants that I live in the Orthodox Brandon’s house, they go and they let you in, like, why would they do that? Um, so let’s go back to the alchemy. So in my own case, the alchemy was, I had to grab in the breakfast. That was always my job. Right. Um, so I did spend seven, seven years over that 16 year, seven years.
Most of it in my twenties, um, living on the roof of a Bremen’s house, that’s like that’s, that’s a Friday night without ever a date. Is everybody clear about that?
If you don’t think that fucks you up about come talk to me later. So I got really good at Sanskrit, but not so good at girls. Never really figured that out because you’re not, that was not on my dance card. There was literally no dance card. Okay. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, but that’s one of the outcomes. So because studentship right in those yamas and niyamas the reason that’s translated celibacy is because you’re not giving up your virility.
You need that to do the studies. You need that for energy purposes. Now under the albums and the very famous term that turns up in the Tundra or vape test, or it means above or upward Natus means sexual fluid, usually semen, right? So you want to go to very common, the term Hata, yoga, you know, they want to get sun and moon. It’s all esoteric contract etymological. Bullshit. Not that it isn’t interesting and real, but it’s not.
The origin of the word is, is from the verbal root. That means to force, to strike, to coerce, to compel Hutta as a verbal root it’s automotive poetic. It means this. That’s what it means. It means to strike. And it’s the sound at mix. That’s the verb. That’s what the word haka. You want me to call this hotter? Yoga? How does yoga is the chemical word for forcing the process from going this way to go in this way?
You are, you, you take you so Bundas pranayama us ASA. A lot of awesome was developed for Al in fact, the only awesome that’s pause. Three reasons for awesome. Is everybody clear about this? The first reason for also that was to sit long enough to do those Vedic rituals. The word often it comes from the verbal root. That means to sit. They’re not fooling around. They mean, sit. If you come with us to south India on the pilgrimage, one of the things we’ll do is we’ll sit before the great fire in the courtyard of should.
I’m going and we’ll do the Houma. It’s an unbelievable phenomenon. One of the things like when I get you there that morning, I’m all dressed up in the drapes. Janice has been there in the drapes with the drapes means like a night, like a six yards of silk.
Um, and I always tell them, I always tell you like, yes, we can get you to the bathroom, but you’d be better off if you desiccated. Cause you’re going to be sitting for awhile. And then everyone goes and you know, you’re all hot to yogis, right? So almost everyone in this room can bend over and bend over. So you, you, when, when your friends bend over and shoved their heads up their own asses, you’re impressed. Is everybody clear about that? You think that’s really cool when I ask you to sit for two hours and kind of not move you go, oh, I’m not sure I can do that.
And you can’t sit still. Okay. But under, under the drapes you can move around quite a bit. I don’t think you found it very impressive to sit. It’s supposed to say that you’re supposed to help, but you’re not even thinking about it. Right? So the first reason that they were introducing seating such as it is, was literally to seat your perspective, right? You’re in, and also you’re always in a seat, the mind, the body, the heart you’re in some vantage point and you sort of address the toughest, the heat that comes.
Um, you can let the ladies and other people can move around a little bit. Once they sit me down and I’m doing this with the priest for three hours, there’s, there’s no like, oh, I got to stretch my legs. It’s like, oh, no. Like from here down you dock, like somebody lifts me up at the end of the deck.
Cause I’ve set, you know, you sit cross like at five, six hours at a time, that was the origins of awesome. And they literally, it changes your perspective when you don’t feel anything from the waist down. Um, but the second reason for Osphena was, was to make the heat, to make the tapas. And then we get very few ancient OSMS. There’s probably no more than five postures that are more than 200 years old. And in India, that was yesterday. That whole, the whole big chart is late 20th century phenomena hooked into British gymnastics.
I mean, we get, we get brick shots. And uh, so the second reason for Austin was to impress your friends and scare your enemies. That is to demonstrate power and to internalize power and to create power and in that category. And then the third reason was introversion to meditate. But the real power of the introversion is literally reversal or dwell with Donnington upside down this.
You want to change the trajectory of life from life to death, from death to life. When you change the trajectory from death to life, you are moving in the direction of the immortal to move the body in the direction of the immortal. You have to, you have to reverse the entropic process. You begin by reversing the entropic process by, by using the hydraulics of the breath, the energies of the breath or hydraulic to do what to force down the passages of the prominence to the center point in the base of the spine, where then those energies that would dissipate and tropically and fall away will reverse up.
And so down EDA, Pingala the two sides of the central noughties, the central breath passages. Now you’re all in tantric lore. You seal those off with the Bundas, the Prada’s directly energy. And literally you send it up.
Otherwise you force this sublime energy Kundalini, the wrap things are called Candella this particular style, right? The rap thing I think, and you extend it from this to that wake up. That’s why it’s the serpentine energy, right? But what the serpentine energy is what’s rising is the sexual energy, which is being forced through three knots and five pivotal positions. Five Chocolat is three grub. Does this is all standard.
Look it up Kundalini stuff, right? But what it really with all of this comes from the outcomes to do this hot tub. You have to force compel the body to change directions because the direction you’re headed in is entropy and death. That’s where this stuff comes from.
So they did it to me. They did it for our reasons Asana. They did it for impressive reasons. That is to make top us. They did it for introverted reasons to send the process in the other direction, what they believed, what they thought was that when you completed the process, not only did this cause realization with the supply, this other category, it caused a realization that that curve, that interpenetrated the two. And so the immortal experience became the immortal body and they weren’t kidding.
They thought realization, the alchemists came to the point where realization, conferred, physical and mortality. That’s what they were about to read at great length about that. And with an unscrupulous assiduous with scholarly detail, go look at a book called the out chemical body. By my old ancient friend, David White, you probably read that he describes these histories and traditions, and then you get that’s where you’re gonna get sun and moon and, and fire sun, moon fire.
There’s going to be the three analogs of the three main passages. And there’s a whole mapping system. That’s going to reorganize the physiology of consciousness through these physical processes. Now full pause, because again, how do we claim this from craziness, right? And, and it’s this that, that the way you physically interact with the world does change your state of awareness. That is yoga always said how you act changes, who you are.
It’s the outside, the outside in is a viable way of addressing the human condition change. What you’re you all know this? Some days you don’t feel like how many yoga class come to yoga, do a little loss enough. And your attitude changes, right? Why? Because the outward world changes your interstate, but the realization of the interstate confers power over the outer world, they also took that to be the case. You want to change your life, change your attitude, right? So how do you change the world?
You change the world from the way your status. Again, what’s sitting behind this. It’s not crazy. The claim that you arrive at physical immortality by reversing the trajectory that, that literally the registration of your, of your sexual fluid. That’s a little crazy.
Is this taken literally? Yes, it is. Is it taken symbolically and allegorically yes, it is. Are the, literalists happy with allegory. Sure. They are. But they also are literal. They’re also physical about, does it then move over? Does it nudge all the way over to being an allegorical way of talking about a process of symbolic self-transformation yes, but you’d have to get all the way over to where my folks are, which is way far out on the fringes.
Most of most Indian alchemy retains some men it’s sort of like, it’s really no different than asking the Pope. Did he really rise from the dead? No matter how you push the guy, he’s going to go. Yup. It’s sort of like asking the Dalai Lama dude, are you really? You’re 14. Are you, where are you really? 13 right now he’s the 14th Dalai Lama. Right? And you say, are you really in the reincarnation of all the Dalai Lamas, it’s gonna look you square in the eye and he’s going to go.
Yup.
And your inner self, your inner voice is going, you gotta be kidding. Right. And so where do you draw the line between, you know, the F the factual and the fantastic, or the factual and the fantasy, everyone religions are always a little confused about that. They’re always a little conflated over these issues. That’s that’s enough to leave it there, but you know, like does do the practices of Hotsy yoga seem to confer a wellness that would, that would, you know, sort of increase your sense of youthful vigor.
Uh, yeah. So, so, you know, so it’s not all just malarkey, let’s go there, right? Like there there’s a lot to the claims, but they put really, they, they went all the way toward Baltimore. So everybody got that and they went all the way to the source of Ruth Stone and you would inject and ultimately, and then in the tantric world, because of the way, because now go to tantric album, this was just the essential development.
When you step into the world, a tantric alchemy, because the world has figured itself because it’s it because death has fractured the one, right. Singularity is in mortality. That’s itself is philosophically not a stupid way to think, right? Why? Because it’s one, literally there’s nothing other, if everything were one, there would be no, there would be no cause for the relationship to deteriorate or to undergo any change. Right? So the township, the township Altium has come along and they go, but look at the world, it has fractured, it has fractal lost.
It’s it’s kaleidoscopic really broken to put it back together is fundamentally the yoga. That’s why yoga is going to be translated, union or reunion reclamation. So it’s a Humpty Dumpty project it’s broken. And you want to put it back together. Once you, as you begin to put it back together, all of the things that are the characteristics of its brokenness, no longer apply.
What’s making it break is we keep adding to the breakage. We keep distilling to the immortal and then giving it up. We keep collecting and re assuming the power that lies at the heart of the matter. And then we dissipated again. We subject it to the same principles of failure. Now, if that’s not bad enough, the world you’ve come in is it’s is, is, is fractured in its binary. So in tantric, Al chemical traditions, you not only have to force these two things back together, you have to re you have to take the process that would create death, the sexual process, and use that to turn it in an opposite direction, because each of us came in, oh, each of us came in, fractured over the binary, masculine and feminine.
Now you’re into yin yang. Now you’re into all of this way, in which half of you is missing.
Just go there. Tantric yoga goes not only is the world fracture, it’s fractured and binaries put the dualism back together to the singularity. And you’ve got to take this thing and put it back together with that thing. Now, if you put those two things together properly, not this way, but this way, right then you wouldn’t create the third. You don’t want to create the third thing you got it. These are the deer in the forest.
They come together and they make moodra and they have a conversation up here. We can do this later. I’ll teach you this practice, but the deer are in conversation. The deer symbolically in all of this war, by the way, stands for the stands for innocent sexual virility, that the deer have no predators. The deer have only creditors. They’re not predators. So in India, mythology Celestials and all kinds of business and beings take the form of the deer in order to enjoy the sports of sexual relationships.
And then they’re all musky and they’re smelly. And they like each other. Apparently deer booty is really ecstatic to the way all over that. So Ms. Lots and lots of stories in Indian lore about interrupting deer who are doing this during this. So this is, this is, so this is murky, the deer moodra, and it’s symbolic in Todrick war for the conversation of the forest, the forest to feelings, the forest of experience, the forest of consciousness, the forest of the unconscious. And you enter into this conversation with each other and the Kula and the community of the heart, the guru disciple relationship, all of that in tantric lore.
And you’re doing this, not this, that’s what the joke is. So, so, but it tantric alchemy, right? The, the, the, the, the sexual passion has to reclaim a process because it, if it culminates to it’s, as it were ordinary worldly goal, if it’s merely for Boga, that is enjoyment, rather than for Moke shop liberation.
You, it, it fails it if you’ve missed its real tasks. So one of the things that the company, because of the out chemical elk and the vast majority of taunting, because want to tell you is that, is that worldlings only do things to enjoy the temporalities of the world, which are nothing but further insists and advancements of the death process. We’re just giving up their fluids and making more life. And it’s just bogus. That’s just the word for enjoyment. And it’s the word for sexual enjoyment, particularly commercial.
Here’s a good one. So a couple of years ago, maybe 10, I noticed this woman comes up to me. If I had, if I had find a dime for every yoga studio I named, um, or, or, or, or can I give it a name? So she goes, she comes up to me and she goes, I looked up in the Sanskrit dictionary and I want to name my yoga studio, yoga, BOGO, the enjoyment of yoga. I said, maybe you don’t want to do that. And she said, well, why? And I said, because let me translate for you, the yoga brothel, that would be the correct translation of that term.
Once you really understood that. So therefore with that dictionary, Eugene, like, what’s that? I think that, and she did it anyway.
Was like, oh shit. I asked my goodness. Now, you know, you’re the bogey because you’re not taking anybody’s advice. Let’s ask the guy who knows, oh, let’s forget that. That’s pretty good. It’s pretty awesome. So, so we’re either doing things. And in the usual sense, in the vast majority of yoga traditions, not just Tundra traditions, um, it’s, it’s, it’s booked to your book is Boda book.
The book, the means enjoyment, lookie means liberation, are you doing it? Are you doing it for enjoyment? Which is by definition, contingent, conditioned, worldly, degenerate, ultimately, cause it degenerate to death. Are you doing it for Milky? For liberation? It’s Anthony has came along and said, oh no, you have to take the sexual act, which is the epitome of bookie. And turn it into a book, the app, an act that liberates rather than bonds, rather than confides.
Well, what would that entail? Well, one of the most important things it would entail would be the idea that, that you would be reclaiming in the process, right? The missing piece of a fractured world.
Now you go all the way to some of the really fancifully gritty, interesting tantric practices. Um, does anyone know it? Federally moodra is, oh, well it’s Sunday and pretty far down the road. So let me tell you about it. Cause everybody wants to know, like, you know, like the nasty, all the nasty about tantra, this is really just gets you right down schizo right down to the really good stuff is, um, if that’s your cup of tea, but it really comes out out of alchemical. Yoga, understand the thing you have to start with is in the alchemy and the alchemical tradition.
You can, you, the path to realization must pass through the material world, right? This is no longer merely Sonka yoga. This division between matter and spirit has to be reunited and re redefine into a singularity, right? If the Donaldsons thought that too, they didn’t think that there were two things.
They thought that this matter thing was really a form of spirit. That’s kind of where Vedanta wants to go. The doctor wants to go. All this stuff you think is, is entropic. Materiality is just energy. All of that energy is in fact complete whole and singular. So all of that matter is just spirit. And all of that spirit is truly immortal. And all of this diversity is really one. Now you’re getting a very kind of clean non-sexual eyes. I’d like to Vedanta the tidy Whitey crew in saffron.
So, so, but, but now enter the top. It goes, who say, actually this materially fractured and Tropic world that Sonka took you all the way to awareness conscious has to be melded back into the spiritual realm. And so their ideas you’re going to have to work from the material. And then literally interpenetrate the material into the spiritual.
And then once you arrive at that highest state of, in which everything is energy, again, you have reclaimed the entire process, but the basic outer chemical strategy is you have to work from the material to the sublime, to the ecstatic theorial states that are, that are taking you out of this ephemeral world and into this sublime reality of energetic inclusion that requires you to move from the material and down here in the material world, it’s all mix.
It’s not just mixed up and muddled up. It’s essentially fractured. So that, so Al chemical yoga, 99% of hot, the other one second is not only telling you, you have to reclaim the other half. They are also I’m ambiguously telling you that only men can do it because, because they have, and that the masculine has to reclaim the feminine energy piece of the puzzle that has been fractured in the of process of diversification.
Nobody liked that demographic of yoga, never likes to hear how, how fundamentally misses sexist the outfit. The origins of hockey yoga are the origins of tantra as hot yoga art, but I’m not making this up follow follow David White all the way through this argument. We all knew this centuries ago. Um, so, so here’s the idea. Um, the real problem is that is that so some of the alchemists are trying simply to cut the out, what am I call it?
The up the ascetical alchemists are cutting off release, right? Bundas pranayama is reverse. The other agonists are doing that, but they’re also claiming that the fractured world needs to take this other piece of the energy, the feminine energy, and reincorporate to do this. They perform that they, before they engage. Now, there’s two different strategies for this.
You either have the, my tuna, the copulation and don’t release and take the sublime energy of the feminine backend or in certain forms of what’s called Bud’s rolly.
Moodra you release, right? The semen is released, and then it’s withdrawn mixed with feminine sexual fluid. That substance is then further. That is either imbibed as such, or that’s put in literally a chemical process of mixing it with mercuric oxide, um, cinnabar, um, that make that distills to a kind of stick.
Um, and they embody that substance as part of the reclamation process of the immortal. They’re literally making the source of her stone. That’s what they think. They’re doing, finding people who really still do this, or talk about this. This is an interesting anthropology, but this, this is still definitely out there. All the crazy things you’ve ever imagined about India are all totally true. So, so, but that, but that ritual is for real, exactly how the sexual fluids that are combined, uh, in the God of book at home are, are withdrawn out.
That’s that that’s a San Fernando valley issue. I don’t even know where to go with that. That’s, uh, that’s a, that’s a, that’s, that’s a whole nother set of projects that we won’t digress too. Sorry. That’s definitely the port heartbeat, like a lot, a lot of weird stuff there, but that’s exactly what they’re doing. Cause they need the physical substance because you have to work from the physical material. You don’t have the physical material, you need to complete the reversal process that penetrates to the sublime and then confers power back into the world.
Again, I want to go off too far on this, but if I didn’t explain how chemical tantra and some of the sexuality rituals that go with it, you’d never learn from anybody. No, one’s going to bother trust me. As soon as you try to read David White’s book, you’re going to give up because it’s serious and difficult and dense and scholarship it’s written for me and a handful of graduate students.
I tried to make these undergraduates read it a couple of years ago and they went out upon it sorta cause it’s just in Spanish related like EV like if you think this lecture was dense, this is nothing. This was just kindergarten to what’s in that, to, to what they really, to the elaborate detail, they went to create this symbolic physicalist system. What I want you to take away from this is don’t underestimate the figure of the physicalist piece of tantric yoga. This is a world about using the material to create the sublime.
And if you don’t and I see all your hands, hang on. And what I want to say is you do that every day in a yoga studio, you use the material experience of your physical embodiment to generate, to be creative, to be experiential, to something that you find sublime, which is a yoga gives you more than a workout. It gives you an experience of yourself. This is just, this is just that idea with a lot of exaggeration attached to it.
Does that make sense with, with in a very big claim? Okay. Now we’ve got plenty of time for questions about this, because I want to move on out of alchemy, please.
Um,.
So, so all these Kumari poojas Shakti, coolest, cooler, yoga. These are all the words for the sexual poojas all have to do. When you sort of go to the contemplative side of the people who write about this, they all tell you that this, these kinds of sexual encounters have to, on the one hand be they they’ve got to have sort of masculine newness to them.
Like they can’t really be your beloved because like, that’s your, like, that’s like the one you actually care for has to be somebody who gets you hot, but not somebody, you know, but they don’t have, they don’t have the thing that they, the masculine Ray cuts, the semen is the essential piece of the puzzle. So that women can’t assimilate that it’s complicated, or they want to explain this, but basically you’re cut out of the deal, like a goal of this distortion.
And my teacher thought it was vile. Reprehensible, misogynist, nonsense, full pause. Not only does he let the foreigner live in his house as a political act, that’s defiant of cast, right? We, we, he had this lovely gay nephew whose sexual preference was obvious. He rescued him. He, his, the only two other folks who I, who ever studied with any commitment to my teacher were these spinsters these two women who live together on the other side of town.
And he was always sort of being questioned. Why, why do these women come to your house? And everyone met. Why do those gay women hang out with you? I thought was revolutionary in his generosity and his inclusion. And the real wonder is how did this, how did he ever get that way? Because you know, he’s born in a village outside to done with him in 1936.
He’s brought to, which is this little village with a giant Nataraj at temple when he’s six or seven years old. And here is what he always said. He said, when we arrived into domino, my mother and my sister and I, we had nothing. We were cast out of our village because my, because of my mother, that is his father, his father had died. His father’s brother had taken them in his father’s brother. Wanted to extract a few favors from his mother who was a widow. And she said, no.
And one thing led to another. And then having a widow, living in your house was always problematic. And a widow in the house with two little children mouths to feed, right? They will literally, they, they, they walked from their village to the temple. They were sitting in the temple when a priest recognized his mother, who she knew, who he knew as a little girl, because his mother’s parents were priests related to the temple.
Please. This temple priest who had no children, took them into his home, were up, lived from his sixth year, all the way through college and graduate school. And it was, and was legally adopted by the priest that you’ve done. But I’m so that he could have a bowl of rice that comes from the priest every day. He said, I was taken in off the street by, by sheer generosity. No one, no one will go hungry in this house.
He’s 18. He brings his two nephews who are impoverished and living elsewhere there. And then actually he starts to write novellas and stories for all India radio to make a living, to feed the family. But so when I think about it, I go, well, you just took me in off the street. He did for me what someone did for him. But here’s the real payoff.
When you have all the places where the priests, if that’s rod, his temple are the most, orthopraxis the most seriously fastidious traditionalist. Let’s call them that. I got lots to say about this stuff, because I’m a little behind myself here, but because I want to move on, I’m going to answer your question. And so they’re very Orthodox people. You know, customs habits, traditions, casts, all of this is real. This is a bit, this would be like moving into a Yeshiva in crown Heights.
Is everybody clear about that? Like, this is an isolated self-sustaining insular conversation. These priests run this temple, but there’s one thing about Nataraj, that’s different than any other temple in India. And that is the way you come. There is the way you are received. If you come as a tourist, they don’t care. They’ll welcome you as a tourist. If you come as a Pilgrim or they’ll welcome you as a Pilgrim, the only rules in the temple are please behave.
According to our rules, your beliefs, your cast, your gender, your preferences, everything else is off the table. I said, he learned everything about what it means to be human from nuts rods. And here’s the pale. These are folks. Here’s how I interpreted. These are folks who have, who are shamelessly committed to the richness of their own traditional identity. And don’t move a millimeter from that and we’ll include anyone in and we’ll welcome anyone else into that world.
Awesome. There they’re going to live the way they’re going to live, but they’re not in isolation. There they are a self-sustaining tradition. They don’t marry outside of CAS. They don’t do. They don’t work outside their world. You know, these are the rules for them. But when we go to visit them, we eat in their house and we go to visit them. We are welcomed as pilgrims because the rules of the temple are, if you behave decently, you can, the way you behave is the way you were welcomed.
If you want to stand on the side in skinny yoga pants and big floppy hat, there’ll be mildly offended, but they’re not going to say anything to you, right? Come properly dressed, come to siding to participate in their offerings, and they’ll include you in everything. And then they’ll send you home so that, so he came by this generosity, as well as this sense of you don’t have to give up any of yourself to be inclusive and diverse.
And so I was welcomed in, which was really radical. And there were many times I can tell, I can go on all afternoon about these stories, but we would walk into a temple together. And then as we would enter the sanctum, I would be like on his heels. And someone would step in front of me and say, not you because, and I tell you the singular best experience of my whole life as a privileged white male overeducated north American is having been denied entrance on the basis of race.
How many guys like me can say they have experienced firsthand the racial stigma? What a privilege to feel that you know why? Because you get apoplectically angry. It is so viscerally disgusting. It’s so infuriating and up up would turn beet red. And then you would see that gentle little man turned into bite off. And I’ve got tons of those stories where he would just intervene and said, do you know who you’re talking to? And then I would get all ashamed and start to cry because he was so sweet, but that’s the guidance.
So, so, you know, like, especially like, I love to tell that story about, about this. Um, now I’m on stories. I’m so sorry, but you know, one, these distant relatives come and they’re in this kind of like urgency this hurry. And it’s some second cousins nephew who they’re gonna marry and they’ve come to like visit all these houses and there’s going to be an arranged marriage. This is cast. You only marry in certain groups and a dog and me and the rules. These are breasts. And then the next day, the boy shows up like on his parents’ heels.
And it’s just so obvious, like this, this is going to be a very awkward thing for this young man. And you can tell that so much of the parent’s anxiety and urgency and seriousness, because everybody gets it and everybody’s in denial and rejection over, over his sort of obvious nature.
And, and, and, uh, he ha he comes in, he sits with us while his parents are already just weeps in front of like, what am I going to do? I don’t want to marry now, but looks at him. And he says, don’t worry, I’ll take care of this. And the parents come back and up. It says to them the way he did this was so great. Cause he got to see, like on the one hand, he isn’t going to, he doesn’t want to offend you. I mean, are there any stuff gonna put up with us? So he looks at them and he says, some men should be confirmed bachelors.
And when they are, they often live with other bachelors man, that was good because on the one, because he has to work because I understood that like you have to work inside what people could understand, but he wasn’t going to let the result turn out wrong.
So he was an amazing guy now. And I think he came by that because he was essentially this, he was this little boy who lived with this incredibly strong mother who, who never learned to read or write. And he had to make his way. And he made his way on the generosity and the Goodwill of others. And he never mistook that he always capitalized. That’s the only way I can explain how he let me in his house. So, so yeah, when, when we came to these, our chemical ritual, like this whole chemical conversation, and then all of this sort of strange sexualities that are associated with first, remember that most tantric sex that you would find on the internet has nothing to do with having sex.
It has to do with this alchemical distillation process has to do with the reclamation of essential fluids and the reversal of this process. That’s why that’s what these endeavors are essentially about. They’re not like, can you keep it up all night? That is not the issue, please.
Just briefly when you’re talking about.
Al chemical process, turning transmutation, turning one thing into turning one substance into another substance. Okay. Do you remember that that more than 70% of Newton’s writings, right at Bailey hall college are, are about our chemical process, how to make gold. In fact, it’s a, probably a good bet that he did or came very close to it. What he found out is that it was more expensive to make, but it was that it was that than it was to have. So it’s the transmutation of substances.
Why is it so important in this particular period of yoga? Because they’re working in a model that wants to reintegrate the material and the spiritual and what you have to, you have to go through the material process to arrive at the spiritual, the sublime, then inner penetrates, and permeates the material. And all literally becomes one substance. One reality is one substance.
This is a non-dualistic project. How do you turn the material world? That’s diverse, plural and changeable into a singularity. And the answer is you have to reintegrate it as all one, literally sort of one thing Vedanta does that by talking about Brockman, the oneness, the expansive principle, they kind of idealize it and turn it into sort of a value in an idea and a kind of spiritual aspiration of an experience. Oh, I’m one with everything that, that kind of thing that, that sort of the internet oneness, right?
The Alchemist took this as a complete, they said, really you can’t, if you, because of the Downton answer to what do we do with the material world is that diversity and difference is essentially an appearance. It’s Maya is ignorance. It’s really not, but it appears to be Madonna. It appears you, the trans community all back, what it really is. And that is a singular substance, a singular reality. This is getting a little clear what it is. You have to turn on tiny.
You’re literally trying to sexual fluid, which is the distillation of immoral power into the diary and to the realization, is that what the Indians called out to me? Yeah. They called the Messiah. That is the movement of the fluids. Yeah. It’s not exactly what they call it.
Does anyone want it? And this is really a good chance to like, cause I I’m pausing here for a second. So, um, before we really move on to a very different kind of subject, but this is, but we can’t talk about the origins of tantra and the seriousness of Contra without talking about sexuality and here sexualities and material is a feature of the material organization of their universe,.
Section of the population as the ability,.
Because as I said, they reduced intimacy to material, sexuality.
But when you, when you see the descriptions of the rituals, like you go to the 1929 chapter of the Tundra, loca to think that that’s him, this is no intimacy in that at all. He’s just using it. Yes, but not right. But it’s not relationship. I mean, the way we were describing intimacy yesterday and have this whole weekend and what I really want to go with, this has nothing to do with this. I mean, it has everything to do with sexuality and sensuality, but it really has to do with intimacy.
This is material transmutation. And what women are to that is another is another feature of the recipe.
Oh, okay. So material transportation would is, is the ability to bring every pool of fractals.
Exactly. Bring all the fractals back to some.
Piece of that fractal.
You’re going to have to be reborn in man, to get to the place where you’re ready for that. It’s like, you’re in the karmic process. You’re just inferior.
Right. Exactly. Right, right, right. That’s a problem. You are, women are, are, are, are follow the blood, follow the blood because that actually becomes symbolically an important feature of understanding the Indian mind before the blood, during the blood, after the blood, right? The feminine world is divided into three phase feminine life is. But to say that my seminal Monte was so was adamantly opposed and rejected. This wasn’t simply because he found it vulgar and crude and ridiculous it’s because he found it misogynist and sexist.
And to his is his deepest sensibilities of human of humanity. Your objections, namely, you’ve just left out like half of human beings was he, he wasn’t about to leave anybody out of any, if he cook, he was he, that was not his, that’s not, that’s an astonishing thing, but we can’t talk about tantra without talking about this subject. What I do I understand about the sex part is that it’s not sex for sexist sake, it’s sex for liberation sake.
Because, because there’s really, it’s really a very simple strategy for 99% of all yoga. And that is bondage to liberation, enjoyment or freedom, fixed and bound or free and released.
That’s the mom. Now, when you finally come to my teachers tradition, you come to a very different world. But I, I, it would be remissive me to explain that as anything but an outlier. Like we’re the heretics I’m explaining to you the main street, of course. Well, well, she’s the power, but what you’re trying to do is reclaim the power.
Literally reabsorbed the Shakti into the singularity principle. What’s a shiver. That’s how they’re going to talk about it’s reclaiming the power. That was his to begin with. Oh, it’s way worse than that. Because reclaiming the power that was his to begin with, to do that. You have to reverse the process of ordinariness because ordinariness is death and extraordinariness is liberation.
Ordinariness is, is enjoyment, bookie, and extraordinariness is smoky liberation, exact opposite. Go all the way back to the origins of yoga, go back to early Buddhists.
And everybody says the same thing. What is not? Liberation is suffering. What is not in this case, what is not? Freedom is fixed. What is not? Liberation is enjoying. Now Kevin joined me. He had from the standpoint of liberation, that’s the next piece of the positive what’s the conflict goes, want to do is tell you that once you’ve been liberated, all those enjoyments are also yours. They’re just no longer yours with the negative accrue, trim, all of ignorance and death and limitation and conditionality attached to them.
Now the real sort of gains your Charlotte organisms of tantra, really raved raise their their heads. Because what they’re really telling you is that the realized being not only has control and dominion over a world in which there are enjoyments, but has, but is no longer bound to any of its rules. You’re not just free to your free frog.
And that’s where all the license of the, of as a kind of manipulative sexual charlatan magician over the world, that’s where all that conversation comes from. Liberation confers upon the world. Not only dominion power over it, but liberation from its terms, which would include all the, all of the ordinary boundaries that, of, of social convention or of material convention, or even natural rules.
Now pause, and I’ll give you another reference. You want to follow this line of thinking all the way through to, to deliberate it being is not only immune and excised from the ordinary and domain. And then step two domain dominion over the ordinary control over the ordinary, but then license over the automatic, right? That is empowered over the automatic, which means all of the things that apply to you no longer apply to them.
Now you’re in the world where the rituals will Incruse will include things like what they call punch up MacArthur.
Has anyone ever heard this term? Okay. Punch. It means five month. Carra means M words, words, beginning with the letter pound. There are five words beginning with the word with the letter at mom’s Matsiya mood. Uh, mud ya mood, my fight eminence. Okay. Let me translate me. Fish liquor, intoxicating liquor moved down here.
Doesn’t mean moodra doesn’t mean gestures doesn’t mean seal or imprint. These are going to dress. Does that mean those? It doesn’t mean the cycle of inside, outside and movement. It means all it means they made this. It’s usually translated parched grain. Like when you look this up, it’ll go, this’ll be one of, it’s not parched grain. They make they’re making anyone know how to make at least or doses. They make like a crepe batter. So they take rice flour and water and a little black gram.
And if you add just the right yeast, you’ll get Salem, witch, trial, hallucinations.
They’re making, they’re making doses that get you high. That’s what we do is that’s what it really is. Like you look up into the dictionary, look it up. And one of these words and you go, well, it says, you know, it says, says meat, fish, liquor, parched, parched, grain, the fuck is that right? And it really actually wouldn’t really, you have to know somebody who’s actually seen it. And I’ve seen it in four or five. We did a plenty of this after pot because you know, you can’t believe they should leave. Say so, including butter Raleigh emojis. So what you, what you have is this stuff that as it’s steamed and concocted and cooked into this food preparation is exactly the Stein of stuff that would get you burned at the stake and Salem.
You know that there’s a good bet that the Salem, which is, um, which is these young women ate the yeast in the bread had had, um, had fermented to a state where it induced hallucinations.
There’s a lot of really solid evidence about this. Now. That’s very interesting. I’m not for much for cookie conspiracy thoughts, but this is stuff we know this stuff really does happen. So Soma is a whole different thing, but som is also an intoxicated. And then the fifth one, my tuna means sexual intercourse. Okay. So why are these the transgressive or hot categories? Because part of part of the claim of liberation is that I would dare to do what you would not even consider thinking, right?
It’s an alterity theory. Superiority is otherness. Get it. And otherness is one way to mark superiority, as otherness is immunity to transgression.
I don’t recognize no us government. It’s the same thing effectively. I would dare. I would. I dare you to cross the spot. So the time that it goes of the transgressive ilk, right, are saying freedom is expressed by the ability to do things that would otherwise come, are otherwise prohibited or trans or understood to be transgressive, but otherwise would also infect you. You would be.
So when you see all the bottles at the Cooma, Mila, you know, bumbling up, stoking the Chillow with the clouds of smoke, the claim is not simply we ingest poisons. You know, that get you high. The real claim is we don’t get high at all. You would get hot.
We can do what you would not dare approach lots and lots of superiority story about it’s sort of fantastic, kind of clean again, tidy Whitey Vedanta story about this that follows the Shanker is around. So the story goes, but Shonk or the great advice of the daunted is OnDeck energized, conquering the directions on pilgrimage with his, with his four great disciples. And they stay, they walk along day and they’re thirsty and they ask for water and they wait for the girl to drink any drinks, water.
And they go, okay, we can drink the water. And they walk the rest of the day and they come to a place and the guy, and they asked for water, but the guy says, I have no water. All I have is liquor. Eric, you know, the coconut Palm, that stuff will light you up. Um, it’s now illegal because they can’t like the government’s so political, like, because they can’t control the, they want to control the moonshine cause they can’t make money on it.
Okay. So, so they come across the moonshine and chocolate drinks, the moonshine, which would otherwise be like, Ooh, you know, like no intoxicants, no, no impurity. It’s a purity, the Dodgers security model. Right? So you don’t take the impurities, see what the topic is. They’re doing, they’re inviting the impurities and tonic. So Vedanta comes along and says, oh no, that would be in pure, but Shaundra drinks. That why? Because he’s immune, right. He’s excised. And then the disciples go well, like he did it. That’s cool. And then they drink. Then they come to the next guy and it’s a Smith and he has water.
He has the water. He has no liquor, but he’s got molten iron and Shakara drinks that, and the lesson is you can’t do it. The girl can do it.
That’s the Vedanta unless the topic has come along and look at that story. And they go, what it was because the real issue is unless you can take the poisons and not be poisoned, you’re not really exempt. So what’s poisoned to you is is nectar to us. And that nectar is neck. Darrious such as it is, but it is not intoxicating. It would do all those worldly things to you, but it does nothing of the sort to us.
So why do they do it in some sense? It’s demonstrably. You have to remember that. Now let’s pause there because yoga has always been committed to the idea that the practices produce demonstrable results, right? Plus you may the town to show me the money. If you can’t, if you can’t show that you’ve got it, you don’t have it. Tonto went very far in the demonstrable category.
One of yoga’s best qualities is to say things that are real are things that can be done. Again, there are things that can be proven. They’re evidentiary. They have efficacy the capacity to produce repeatable results, efficacy, right? And the efficacy mark here was if you’ve achieved, you can show it yogis resort to the mystical unseen only under duress, whatever mystical states they ordinarily claim for themselves have demonst, concomitant, demonstrable evidence that the rest of us would get food and over.
We’ve got to get the big, Ooh, that’s, that’s the story. Fast forward again, if you have different kinds of stories. So I’m sitting in up us foyer where we sat all day and then right. Four or five o’clock they start this sort of ersatz Darshan line starts at the, at the gate. People come to see him every day. They want seats for their children.
They want to settle their marital disputes. They want to know how to negotiate a financial district. They’ve got all kinds of stuff and oppose the Wiseman. It’s very interesting. And I kind of retreat to the staircase. That’s, you know, on the foyer, there’s a staircase and I would sit in the staircase and listen, and no one would think that I knew what was going on, except I had it. I could follow the conversations and I would, he would take people through, like he would do all kinds of wonderful things like Jedi wonderful things. Like some guy would be really animated. Like I’m leaving this woman, he’s sitting next to his little wife. And she was like, this just terrified and scared.
He’s ranting about, you know, what a horrible person she is and how he’s going to leave her, what he’s going to do. And I put, would look at him and he go, you’re not going to leave your wife.
And I would say to myself, these are not the droids you’re looking for. You know, he had that kind of like, cause he just had this sort of this incredibly charismatic, good, very sweet authority. And he would sort of take you on that journey to, well, this is what you really want. So this guy comes one day and he’s fresh from the sidebar Bosch rock. And I felt like me even today was deeply conflicted over the sidewalk because everyone knows the sidewalk. You get a big hairdo. There was of Shirdi was this sort of mousy little guy who did a lot of saintly things.
And then there’s this other guy who in the last 30 years was called also called Sai Baba and ice called heritage thought. Cause he had a big Afro. He just died a couple of years back. The reason I’m all deeply conflicted is that he, he built hospitals and did I camps schools.
And they don’t a lot of really kind of good work in the world, but he was really famous for like having these huge gatherings where he would produce holy ashes out of thin air. And then he would produce watches, very famous, like, look, go YouTube, this side, Baba watch trick, like go do that. You’ll find it. It was all really there because India gotta remember, this is the civilization that gave us the rope trick, who we, who we could. Right. Do. Why? Because it is the entire ethos of the civilization is spiritual achievements have demonstrably worldly consequences.
What’s the point of having an interior life unless it has demonstrable results in the world that that’s actually a really commendable notion. So we’re sitting in the foyer one day, this guy shows up who’s a neighbors live. So I dunno how we knew him. He, this, this middle-class guy and he comes over and the conversation is sort of like a dare.
A sort of a, the subtext of the conversation is I saw CIBA. He’s a great being. And he made the booty, you know, the white ashes, shy lights smear on their heads, which stand for Jeff and sex and Moonlight and which is what they stand for. And then he makes a, and the sub whole sort of any hall subtext is can you do that? Cause you’re a putative great being, oh, Mr. Grapiness Nope was like, he never gave a shit about any of that.
Right. So, and then, and then, and then he was so generous to this guy because it was all like a Darby doomy kind of conversation of, and it was, and this guy was genuinely, wow. He really thought this happened. And I put the guy leaves and I go, I go off, what do you think of that? And he goes, watches, how about world? Peace?
Like you just thought like, like what a silly thing, you know, if you’re going to put yourself to a task, why not actually matter? That was his objective. On the other hand, we were very conflicted because this guy also did a lot of really great work. So on the one hand, he’s a charlatan. And on the other hand, because he’s using trickery and manipulation. Cause I don’t know. Cause you know, watch this walk. If the two things are true here, he does good work. And he’s a charlatan. Everybody clear about that. That’s my opinion about it because does the magician pull a rabbit out of the hat?
Yes. That’s a trick. Rabbits come from other rabbits. They don’t come from that. So we know watches don’t come from thin air. So it’s uh, I’ve always was a no magic guy, right. But Indians love magic. So, and don’t forget that tantra was the magical tradition. It was the place where magic took on magic is this, this is what makes Indians love magic. The achievement of inner wisdom has demonstrable material results.
The accomplishments of body, mind, and heart have, have repeatable consequences for the world. That is not a crazy thing to think. Can that become abusive? Manipulative and crazy? Absolutely not. That seems perfectly clear to me. Probably seems driven. So don’t dismiss it, but try because there, because they really were after something that we would call science, can you do the experiment twice per head? That’s serious business.
And then if you can do the experience, show me the money, right? Like, like chaired experience is real experience that how overboard can that get media blessed the way over let’s push this forward. Okay. So every tantric tradition has two pieces to it, to itself, whether it comes from these ascetical modalities or whether it emerges out of these household traditions of hiding in plain sight, like I said, I was going to give you a reference.
If you want pause. If you want the wacky far out their version of the householder, you want to go back to an old book written by my pal, Robbie Swoboda called a Gora at the left-hand of God.
And here you have what I call up the ante tantrum left. The one way the later Todrick traditions is talked about is, is it’s called left. Right? And Ms shut up, which means mixed up. We have another category called left, right? And what’s called some male and the comp the more than that’s my own tradition, but the right side of these traditions, we’re, we’re attempting to sort of sustain the semblance as a bromance of Dominical period of I didn’t like those because I was evidenced that he wanted to break those rules except he didn’t break those rules except the day.
Right. So for him, they weren’t, it wasn’t all tidy and clean. It wasn’t because, right, right. Side traditions or purity traditions attainment is cured. Thank you for that. Left-side traditions are impurity as attainment. Get, it will dare to do what would be otherwise offensive.
So impurities attaining the way you would recognize realization on the left-hand is impure bite. That is by conventional standards. So to give you an example, I mean, Swoboda his book, there’s a whole series of these that, and he, and, you know, Robbie swears that Winola and under the girl who’s in, it was a real guy. And so did Carlos Casteneda tell us Don long, this real that’s also bullshit. So do you know the cast Denita? You do know the cast that Nate, his PhD from UCLA was revoked, right?
Yeah. Because the second book after the teachings of Don Juan, the journey to Exelon was the better part of his PhD dissertation and quite curiously, the Don law and the Indian shaman, who he shares the Mescalin with and all the rest, and then becomes his disciple, which is really very much a tantric story. Um, no one ever sees him, no one ever.
No, there’s no evidence of this guy. Um, early on in, you know, the teachings of Don Juan is this the first book, it’s a diary of Carlos, Casteneda his relationship to this shaman esoteric teacher. Right. And, um, and he talks about how he has this friend who introduces him to Don Juan who’s, this Yakima, Indian who he, who goes to Sonora, Mexico and meets him on his front porch. And so the whole story starts from there, right? No one ever met Casta Neda’s friend, no one ever.
There’s no evidence anywhere of Don Juan’s instantiated human reality. So a lot of people think that Carlos did a lot of Mescalin in a Mexico city hotel room and had a very vivid imagination about all the things he experienced in sod. So when I started to study this material, part of the problem was that in the household or tradition, first of all, the, you know, like how are you going to find these esoteric living in a cave, you know, dope Rosta hair, Ash, smeared, outlier shamans.
Well, actually next time I’ll bring the photograph of the bottle. You know, whatever the bottle of my office, I have a photograph. Mike, does you guys, I have a photograph of a guy. I spent a month in a cave with who, when you look at it, you can’t believe it’s a photo because this guy lives in a cave. Um, so, so we did find some of those, but more interesting was is the other side of this tradition is what you would call the hiding in plain sight householders. So a lot of tantra came from the Clark Kent by day Superman at night, get it like in other words, they have an exoteric social reality and they have an esoteric spiritual practice, which in many esoteric cases would include this sort of drifting to the left transgressive idea.
So now you enter Robbie Swoboda is world of Agoura at the left hand of God.
His contention is that his group Vemo Ananda is an ordinary everyday guy who lives in an apartment complex in Bombay. But that book starts with them. Ananda meditating on the, on the decomposing corpse of an infant in a cremation, a partially decomposed infant in the cremation bed, as a way of saying he would dare do you know, he’s he is excising himself from all the sentiment of ordinary connectivity to a world that would otherwise upset you.
And the real answer is this stuff is real. It happens, just get with whatever is really you get when it is really real would include all of these offensive and transgressive deeds. And once, but once you start there and notice it like, like how much weirder can you get? Like where do you go from that? Right. So it becomes an up the ante mob, but a lot of the exoteric esoteric, the overt Kovar sensibilities of Todrick has happened inside these household or traditions.
Whereas the Buddhists put it in a curriculum like you move along and then you get to the book in that sort of the last stages. When you study in the Buddhist monastery, you sort of get to the Anita, the unsurpassed tantra, and then that’s all kind of laid out for you. And then you have to get all the, all the secret stuff orally in the Hindu traditions, hinges weren’t ecclesiastical. They were clannish. So they taught inside familial lineages. So all of the limbs. So when you entered the teachers’ household, the assumption was exoterically for appearances sake, you would be part of caste community.
You just raise your, you know, your family looks like ordinary hinders, and then behind closed walls, when you do the poojas, when you do the rituals, when you do the practices and the motivations, then you’re off in esoterical. And so the real quick, so there was this sort of right left shift and the right side would be pure for the world, but in pure for the like NPR SF, esotericism, but purity in the exoteric world.
And that would be the way to do it. Right? So then, then you get the secrecy idea filtering into tantra. How about had nothing to do with any of these ideas, but this is the way the tradition historically organized. Let’s keep going. So well, let me give you the distinction. Cause there’s other ways in which this manifests to assuming to Marty to up up the idea was that was, was this simple exoteric spirituality is customary religion, holidays, familial stuff.
Hachem, Matcham dispatch, um, four wheel religion stuff, all this stuff that you should be mindful and respectful of because it traverses the world with civility.
Whereas he would use the word spiritual to be, to recognize your claim on your deep, personal interests, in your conscience, in your own experience. Yeah. The reason he could do this is because of this basic stratagem of the way Hindus do their business and the. Well, let me put it in tantric terms. All tantric traditions have what’s called a and a new possum.
Sid S I D D H a N T. Ed Siddhanta is the one word and opossum Oupa Asana is the second word. It’s awesome. With a UPA in front of him. Who possum, let me explain the words. Siddhanta is, is the, until the conclusion of one’s attainments, a Siddhanta is a doctrine, a theory. It’s a vision of the world. It’s a, what you think nature, culture and conscience is telling him it’s a worldview.
The doc advised that the Dante has dozens of those. And everybody’s got a Siddhanta everybody’s everybody’s got assumptions, evidence, reasons, and religious conclusions. Everyone’s got to sit down. Think of it as a belief system.
You pasta it’s the practice system. Cause the word literally means to sit nearby. It’s it’s it’s the, it’s the system of putting it into setting it into motion. Lots of now, now here’s, here’s an interesting feature of this Siddhanta is for hinders are either very formal or very private.
So your family Mike belong to a Siddhanta. This would be no different than saying we were raised Episcopalian. It’s like, there’s a catechism for that. We were raised Catholic or Methodist or whatever. And you go like, this is so think of the sedans as your catechism in a formal sense. It’s a formal body of teachings and Hindu philosophers go to great lengths to nuance their sedans. That’s why, when you say something like advice of a Dante non-dues to the Dante and you go back to say, Sean Crow, who’s the pivotal eighth century character of that tradition.
What you find out is it chunker is Siddhanta is a very particular thing. It’s a series of ideas and arguments and values. And it’s formal. It’s a philosophical, formal understanding of what you think. The, what do you, what do you think the world’s doing? What do you think you can do about it? Where would you want to end up? It’s a theology now, but here’s the interesting piece. Hindu’s either have very formal theologies or very private theology.
What I mean by that is in a house like mine, where my teacher’s family are Brahmins and then they’re broadens and they’re mostly come from ship based traditions. And then those Shivah based traditions give them different sorts of outlets of piety and practice and custom and tradition. But for the most part, Hindus don’t care what you believe to make this abundantly clear. And this is really a very interesting feature.
If you come with us, for example, on the pilgrimage in south India, we literally go from temple to temple, to temple, right? We see the gods. We see all kinds of fantastic, beautiful rituals, no priest, no one in the temple, no lay person, no priest would ever ask you what you believe.
There’s no doctrine whatsoever. None you, if, and then what Americans, foreigners will do it. They’ll ask the police. They’ll go, well, what am I supposed to think here? Like what, what do you believe? And they kind of look at you. Like they don’t even get the question because that’s your business. Like as Siddhanta SKO, they’re either very formal or they’re entirely personal and private. Let me put it another way. It’s a very good argument to be made for the way in which belief trails way, way behind other categories of spirituality for hinges.
This is very hard for us to understand. We are not only civilization, the Western model. Theisms not only bequeath us notions like belief systems. They teach us to have beliefs, but we are a culture that believes in belief. We think beliefs are really important. They don’t, they think beliefs are very not important in comparison to other things.
And that would be particularly whether you’re well behaved or not. When you, so when you go, for example, to not draw this temple, no one will ever ask you what you think, what you believe. There’s no catechism. There’s no litmus test. There’s no boxes to check. No one will care. What they’ll care about is stand here. Not there, right? Do this. Don’t do that. If you’re a woman in your hair is down, please put your hair up. It’s all.
Orthopraxy no orthodoxy. Get it. Orthodoxy needs, correct words. Doxy, doctrines orthopraxy is correct practice. So they’re their orthodoxy is or the practice. That is what you believe is what you do. So, so all they care about is your behavior. They don’t really care about your belief. This is very hard for us to fathom because we, you know, there’s a certain way in which that’s true.
Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience where like you literally walked through the Vatican portals and you go, oh shit. And then some of you, some part of you knows that like the guys in the Michelangelo uniforms won’t do anything to you. If you’re mildly well behaved, but you do feel like put your, put your whole inner being is telling, saying this to yourself. If any of this shit were true, like you’re just going, like, what the hell is the story here? Because there’s not only a story here.
There’s a story you’re supposed to have, right? When you walk into that Hindu temple and there are a Jew and there are that many images and that much artistry and that much, that same sense of evocative overload of narrative, myth, ritual, aesthetic, the Hindu case is, and you go, what does this all mean? The first answer is they don’t know either. Okay. Really? They don’t know Jack or his best friend.
They’re always asking me. Okay. Because it’s my business to know. But they don’t know because they largely don’t care. It’s not, what’s important. You don’t walk in there to be inculcated into a belief system. You walk in there to participate in a kind of semiotics, a sign and symbol system of evocative awareness. It’s it’s, it’s what I used to call the theater of memory.
You’re what, oh yeah, yeah. But belief is a distant feature of the way these systems work. So they either have very formal Saddam does, or they have very private and personal stuff. So that it’s win-win which when you think about it, it isn’t all that ridiculous. Like, so you’re sitting, so say you go to like the, one of the, one of the cholesterol holidays, you know what I mean?
By that? Like, it’s Easter. Like you never go to church, but to go with your mother, you have your family to church on Christmas Eve, go there. It’s just for an example, we’re Passover. You don’t do anything Jewish when you go to Passover. Right? And, and if you actually interrogated people in the pews, you would get as many stories as they have experiences. Right. Even though there’s a formal, Siddhanta, there’s a good thing. Kat, there’s a formal set of belief.
That Pope had a very interesting moment this week, right? This is the whole idea that he called this woman in Argentina who wanted to know if she could take communion. And he said, and they had a private conversation. Well, the formal view of the churches, no, she’s divorced. She can’t take communion. End of story. Right. And then today, Russ Doha in the New York times, what a jerk he is, right? Writes this whole piece about this, about, about this sort of conflict between like what the, because Roscoe’s, well, it sends the message. Even the Pope doesn’t believe this stuff, right?
Because he seems to have said to this woman it’s okay, it’s between you and your conscience have your own story. Right. And which violates church teaching church teaching is Siddhanta Hindus have only formal Siddhanta and no one knows him. And no one enforces them.
No one enforces her belief is not an enforceable process. It’s not a conscience. There’s no conscience of guilt for these folks. Does that make sense? It’s not there. Well, we find that refreshing cause we live. Cause you can’t walk into the Vatican. You know how you walked through that portal and you’re like parents St. Petersburg without going, whoa, I can feel the doctrine in the air. Right? You’re breathing belief. Right? These folks, when you walk into the temple, first of all, you’re just too wigged out by how much it’s going on. But you also think, but you’ll walk in thinking this is a belief system and I don’t get it.
What is it? And the correct answer is they don’t care. They really don’t mind. They’re not interested. If you ask each one of them might have their own belief system. So, but they’re, so their religion is not a belief system. Their religion is we do this. This is what we do.
When we were starting doing, or my mother-in-law wanted us to do all the stuff. And I was like, well, what does it mean? Why are you comfortable doing it? And I was like, no,.
Bettina, Meredith Bengali. The answer is we do this because this is what we do. And we do it like this, not like that. Right? So last, last summer, I, one of the great stories of my life is that in the last few years we’ve had this, I’ve had this Indian, this south Asian man who’s, who’s an oncologist, retired from the hospital at the university. I’ve he’s been my Sanskrit students. And his grandfather was actually bill Hondas.
Gandhi’s primary school principal. So these are good. Dorothy Brown ones from Roger Cook, very old, old family stuff. Right. And the, he came in the seventies and he’s a doctor and he’s this lovely, beautiful soul. And of course the hilarious part is that the white kid from New Jersey teaches the Indian paraben. And then his daughter announces last year that she’s going to marry this African man from Malawi who she’s met in graduate school.
The potties are incredibly generous, inclusive, lovely people. They’re like all for it. And in fact, these Malawi people, they came to the Hindu wedding, like, sorry, isn’t that great. And the next day we had a Christian wedding and it was like all African and they’re standing there dancing and singing. And in this incredibly uptight white congregationalist church is such a good scene. Like we had such a party, but so Dr. Pond is like, has to go. So he says, his daughter wants a full-on Vedic wedding, like a real Hindu wedding.
And now he’s like, you could just shoot like so wigged out. Where’s he going to do that in Rochester? He’s going to have to get a priest from Cleveland and they’re going to have to find a venue. And then they’re going to have to build a fire and I’ll do it in my front yard and I’ll do the mantras.
So last summer I did a full on Vedic wedding in my front yard. So with 150 good draughty Browns. Now the only thing that you know, when you do that is you cannot fake it because they have no idea what you’re saying, but they know everything that should be done right. Last down to the last one. And it’s the one person in the room who will take offense is the one you’ve got to get. Right? Because in that, in that, the girl in that room, in this case was his Elvis sister. If I could please her, everybody else was falling line and the pleasure was not, the pleasure is I did it.
It just, so does that make sense? Because that’s ortho, this orthodoxy is, orthopraxy what you believe is doing it, right? Not what you think it means, what you think it means is yoga business that you do it the way we all expect it to be done. That’s our business.
That’s a very hard thing to fathom. But again, in the top of that, it makes perfect sense because in a sense, it’s saying your outward acts will change your interviews, bill evolve, your interviews and your interviews create your out or ask, but your interviews are yours. They’re not mine. I don’t have any big, I can never know what you’re experiencing. I can give you the tools to cultivate your experience, right? That’s what teachings do. So first point is sedans are either very formal or very private.
Now let’s pause on the formal parts of the Siddhanta is just to make sure we understand what that means. The vast majority of yogas, the sedans says begin with you were in bondage and there was a teaching deliberation and the Siddhanta explains to you what liberation is and how it is you got in bondage and what that state of and what happens as you approach liberation and what liberation would confer upon you in the world.
Everybody clear what we mean by that. So what does it mean to be free is a conversation they have, what is liberation is their sedans. And they end, they deeply disagree over that. The same way Christians disagree over what salvation is or heaven is, or anything else about doctrine. They’ve got as many views of that as they have views.
Yeah. They all, they have as many views of what it means to be free as they have sedans and they all deeply disagree. So for example, many of them shit. So, so think of the, tantras literally as a body of teachings or as a body of, of work, think of it like a Bible when they come along, they’re theologians, when they argue with each other and they say, oh no, that guy’s version of the Bible is wrong. My version is correct.
Mo all of the commentaries are written in exactly. That polemical tone. There is no commentary. That goes, oh, everybody’s okay. You know, I’m okay. You’re okay. Those guys were okay. No, no, no. If you they’re wrong about what liberation is, they’re not really getting liberation. Liberation is getting the argument right. There is doctrinally. Fastidious has any tradition and they’re arguing for their point.
And now that’s not insane either because who holds an opinion that they don’t think is true. And when you hold somebody up and if you think everybody else’s opinion is just as good as your opinion, you don’t have one, right? So they don’t. So tolerance in the Hindu tradition doesn’t mean all of those other versions of liberation or truth. They’re not perennialists, they don’t go, oh, we’re off. They don’t go. We’re all going to the same place. That’s that’s Western 20th, 21st century yoga, bullshit. That is not true. They don’t think we’re all going to the same place. They think those guys got it wrong.
That’s what they really think. What they’re not willing to do really is Pitchfork. You, you know, they don’t have an inquisition. They don’t have a mechanism of exclusion, ostracization they don’t have, and they don’t do that over beliefs.
It wouldn’t occur to them to sort of burn you at the stake for your beliefs. Does that make sense? Metaphorically? What? Oh, well, that’s a different thing. They don’t hate them because they’re Muslims. They don’t hate them for their beliefs. He’s fucking hated. That’s all different. There’s lots of reasons to hate people, but doesn’t come to the top of the list. Okay. So tolerance doesn’t mean your views or your views are okay, because one, this means we’re all going to be the same. There’s no sort of, there’s no sort of Neo the daunting inclusionary.
Oh, the Christians that are going, we’re all going to Brotman it’s all going to be one that is a total Swami bullshit. Nothing in the traditions says anything like that, but they really think is unless you get the argument right. In the formal sense, you’re not going, you, you, you aren’t getting the liberation and we own all resolved at the same thing.
You’re just wrong. You’ll just die and be reborn until you get it. Right. Okay. But what they really don’t have is any social cultural mechanism for enforcing or caring about how beliefs would make that determination. Why? Because they are tolerant over they’re tolerant over beliefs without thinking you can be without validating. It does that make sense? Based on care. What’s the Bernie for the stake, for his behaviors. They don’t like what you do, or they don’t want you to influence them.
So if you come and try to change my people from doing what they’re doing, like convert my people from doing what they’re doing, to what they’re doing, to what you’re doing, we’re going to burn you out for your beliefs, but for fucking, with our water behaviors. Right? Sounds like crowd control. Well, it is it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s socialization. Poss religion is socialization and the hinges are kind of okay with that.
I was leaving in the once. You know, I’d been there a really long time without always sent me home. And I was going home in the Christmas time. And I’m like, I really hate Christmas. Tonya was like thing. And that this and that, that I feel oppressed by it. And I say to him, you know, I’m going home to this. And he looks at me. He goes, you help your mother with that tree. If that’s what she wants, I go, why’d ya. I don’t believe in any of that. He goes, belief, that’s your business, the tree, that’s your mother’s business. What’s your family’s business. What does it cost you to do that?
So he thought that he thought that he thought the stakes were well, if the stakes were high, that that would be different. But the stakes were well. Okay. So the Sudan does, are either very formal when they’re very formal. They’re very rigorous. Don’t think that Hindus are like, wishy-washy tolerant about this. They were fastidious serious argument, serious arguments about what they think is at stake and how they think you’re going to get there. Okay. But as beliefs go, it’s 95% of it is all private.
And the topic is really like the private side of that. And the way you know, that is very interesting. I’ll give you an example and we’ll move on. The great philosopher who writes out the Siddhanta called Trico. The triadic world is the Kashmiri Shai bite named WNL looked up his principle disciple who survives his name, shaman Raja. When shaman writes his commentaries on every page, every page, not every other vision, every page I can point to a place where he is in direct disagreement with his teacher.
While at the same time he’s honoring and touching his Lotus feet. He’s he says, he’s. He says, this is my teacher, right? What they’re really telling you is that the Siddhanta is your experience. And so there’s room for diverse views. The last thing I would ever want would be to tell me what to believe. Because if you go back to stay in the middle of the things, ask any question, look for the black SWAT. But you, you begin to look at the strategies of learning your, your experiences have to be what’s real now.
So then what are the teachings as teachings? Like as they’re, as they’re they’re God they’re they’re God or their kind of basic parameters, but the real issue here, isn’t in the Siddhanta it’s in the impossible. How do you get near to this? The pasta then takes you to, we’ve got time to do this.
It takes you to the five categories that are going to make you a tantrika there’s five ways. You’re going to be a Thompson and all of those five ways crystallized around you pasta and think of a pasta as practice. But think of practice. Now, I’m going to give you a monkey wrench. Think of practice as ritual, because ritual is the way in which an ordinary behavior becomes a narrative of self-awareness ritual is the way an ordinary behavior becomes a narrative of self-awareness ritual is the way you tell yourself a story, but mostly you do things that you would otherwise do.
Let me give you a simple example. We’re about to go to graduation. We’re going to put on a funny costume and we’re going to March in now we’re going to sit down and we’re going to stand up. We’re going to sing some songs.
Some people are going to say some shit, and then you’re going to walk out, right? So for the most part, things you do are things you would do. Anyway, you get dressed up for an event, right? You would dress each other in ways in which you tell stories and narratives and declaim, the nature of nature and your social position and your world. And you create rites of passage and understand relationships, right? You do very Wondery things, but you, the reason you formalize it is, you know, that you’re doing that, right?
So, and one of the principles of the Tom codeine is that the awareness of being in the ritual, the knowing that, you know, you’re doing that gives you this space of awareness and contemplation and understanding where in that formality of behavior, you create an opportunity to assimilate, receive, address, interpret experience a possibility.
Let me give you another way of thinking about this. If you go to the mat tomorrow, right? There are rules, no touching. Can’t take pictures, right? If people are there to enforce the rules, think of those as the priests, right? And think of the museum as a temple, and you kind of like decide, you’re going to stand in front of this painting and someday, and you, and on one day, like, so you’ve, you’ve been before and you go back and the reason you, and the last time you went, you, you remember all I was here and you may or may not remember what you did, but something happened to you, right?
And then you come back and then something else happens to you.
So you create this opportunity in this form of behavior, in this encounter of relationship, with image, narrative story, mitos aesthetic experience, to have an experience, the formal that you know, that you’re doing it. You’re not just opening an art book on your table, but you’re kind of going, you’re ritualizing the event by attending, you know, the museum like going to the service, you know, like going to the graduation, attending the wedding, whatever it is you’re doing, right.
That the awareness of doing it changes now, here’s what the topic is. Also. Now you could come to your graduation, hung over indifferent, not giving a fuck you’re there because your parents came and you have to go and you don’t even barely remember what happened. But the topic is, think that if you go through the ritual, it changes you because you don’t have to mean it to have it have consequences.
We’ve all had a 91. If you had a one night stand, you know, that’s true. You don’t have to meet it to have consequences. All you have to do is do it to have consequences. So your awareness is in some sense, optional to a ritual, right? And when it is, it’s kind of, and it desiccates, you, you don’t, you don’t like, and the Telefonica says, don’t make your awareness. The option of the ritual know that, you know, you’re doing it. It is put that space of as put that spirit, open that space of opportunity to consider what you would put in that space.
So original was an opportunity to create a narrative of relationship.
There’s a relationship that that’s good. And the relation to the relationship in the museum is with the painter and with the guards and with the other people who have gone to the museum at the graduation, it’s the event. It’s wherever you’re graduating. It’s the people who were there. It’s who shows up, right? It’s the stand up, sit down. It’s all the event. So original Korea. And with that event is unbearably some story or another, right? That’s why it’s a narrative of opportunity because the ritual usually comes with a story. And that story is really usually a myth.
And even when you go to a graduation, it’s a mythic, it’s, it’s a reality with a mythic consciousness, right? You wear the funny costume and the costume is symbolic. It’s symbolic of what? Symbolic of different kinds of learning. And why is mine hot pink? When it’s supposed to be Crimson was a kind of, it’s actually a Crockett and Tubbs error of Harvard in the middle eighties.
That’s like sort of a Miami vice Harvard road because of when I graduated, um, the colors are Crimson, but mine. So I pick, um, picks my favorite color. Um, but, but it’s symbolic of, you know, why is it, you know, why there’s a hood in academic gowns? It’s for alms alms. When they walked through town, people would put arms in your hood because you gave up. Cause it’s a vocation of learning. It’s a sacrifice of learning, right?
So there’s all of this. Like, you don’t have to know anything about what’s going on, right? And yet all of this symbolic imagery is informing the narrative.
So every time it has a Siddhanta and your lineage usually has a formal Siddhanta, but most lineages don’t impose any formal Siddhanta when you hear people talk about authentic contract, they usually are espousing a particular Saddam without the notion that somebody else’s Siddhanta could be completely different. I’m often accused of being not real or inauthentic. I’m actually the guy who had an Indian teacher, not the one who’s inventing one. No.
Um, and his views were wildly heretical in comparison to almost every other. Siddhanta he, my uncle thought himself a traditionalist because he was in conversation with tradition. And most of his conversation with tradition was not like that.
Right? I mean, he was more than contrary. He was heretical that didn’t make him less. The guy down the hall from me who said, he’s actually a Maronite Catholic priest is so far off the Catholic reservation, but I’m sure, but I can tell you, Kurt thinks of himself as a Catholic, even though he disagrees with everything, the church, virtually everything he says, we used to have black smoke jokes about the last book becoming a no black smoke here. It’s like, wait for this guy to die.
I mean, hilarious. But in other words, kerosene is just somebody else’s view of what their orthodoxy is. What I’m telling you is that orthodoxy is a plural of diversity and contention in all of yoga. So when anyone ever says, well, this is the real meaning, or this is the real teaching. Just let all the lights go on in your head and go.
That’s what they think, right? That’s their view. And I can guarantee you not only any number of more views, there are, there are contentions challenges and contradictions to those views anywhere you look, all you have to do is be encyclopedic enough to know what they’ve re, know what they’ve all said. We can help you do that. If you want to learn every last little bit of every topic, a tradition has a Siddhanta. What I would say is they all think they’re right.
Cause who doesn’t to which I would also say it’s none of my business. If I’ve always taken up, up, up, up, up with the one who taught me this quotation from Thomas Jefferson, who said, whether a man has one, one God of 20 gods, um, if he’s not reaching into my pocket or breaking my leg, his religion is not my concern.
So which didn’t mean that he agreed with you where that he endorsed your views or he’d that he even approved of them. What he meant was it’s your conscience, not mine. That’s a very, very Hindu way of thinking about the world. What he would care about is if you were picking my pocket or breaking my leg or doing that to somebody, I cared about you. We care a great deal about that. So who possum Palestina is ritual because ritual and what the topic that doesn’t want is mere go through the motions, desiccated, meaningless ritual.
But, but the meaning isn’t in necessarily in the meaning, the meaning is in the, do it, let me pause and make this point clear. I said, there are five elements. This’ll take you right to the heart of the Hindus, right? To the heart of what happens when you see Tom, the first of the five elements is Dave atop.
The gods, the gods Siddhanta of the gods might be everything from the gods of the fractal realization of a singularity whose power you’re appropriating. They really are gods because there really is a divine energy and you’re tapping into it. I would call that the right side of the equation. The more theistic side of the equation, who are the gods, the gods are the representation of the singularity.
The singularity is power and the power is offering itself in varying degrees of access. By the way, in which you address can create a relationship with the divine who are the gods, and why is the divine plural? Because it’s fractal cause it’s kaleidoscopic. It doesn’t appear as a singularity. It appears as a multiplicity and there are 330 million dots. At the very least on the far left of that side, you might find someone like me who thinks that the gods are the ways in which we see ourselves, the ways in which we experience our own experience.
So who are the gods? They’re the ways we understand. We understand the diversities and pluralities of the natural world of how culture creates itself and of the formulations of our own conscience, tomato clinically, very simply the gods. The gods tell you that your every character in the story, your Frodo, you’re the ring. You’re Sol rod. You’re the shyer. You’re everything in the story. You’re everyone in this story, you’re all the heroes are all the villains. They are your mythic consciousness revealing to you.
And so this Siddhanta of my own tradition, where, well, who are the gods? What are they for? They are the keys to the access of imagination, dreams, and the unconscious. There are particular leverage into the reflection, the mirror and the prism, the refraction of your own experience. There, you, that’s a pretty heretical left side of the equation. As you drift to the writer side of the equation, the gods represent an encompassing energy, uh, that we would call the divine is SRE the power.
And you are accessing that liberate, that singular force of the universe. I personally don’t have quite as mystical a sense of that. I, I would say my side of the equation is Mo is almost entirely. Him is entirely humanist. And secondly, who were the gods, there, there are ways in which we, we allow the imagery of the diversification of a symbolic narrative. The gods all have symbol.
They all have their, their, I can have graphs, right? They tell us, they tell us symbolic stories. We can know their myths. We can know their stories. We can other images, but we can use them as mirrors and prisons. I said, mirror, you’re looking back at an imperfect image of yourself as a prism. You’re looking at yourself and you’re literally just shattering it into. So how many more, that many more, what the Tajik world wants to tell you is that there are as many gods as there are thoughts, feelings, impressions, ideas, dreams, images, mythic constructs, all of the possibilities are literally in an unimaginable fractal multitude.
The more you can connect, the more you can relate to the more you can draw your identity through any one of these portals. So the next phase of the gods in the ritual is that almost all of us have, what’s called the David top. That is a God that is up particularly one. We like one that we, that we relate to when it confers a sense of connectivity to ourselves.
So my own tradition is shocked up or goddess based. That’s very, and it’s very south Indian. So, but our issue, uh, moves between various versions of the goddess, particularly when she’s in the queenly beneficence, when she’s wearing her blood and ferocity in the somewhat dissimulate form of, of a house holder queenly presence, she’s called Raja that is th th the goddess who is the queen of Kings.
So she wears a red sari, which is the simulated blood of Cali. So instead of the natural, she’s a much more in she’s in she’s cultured to a nature goddess, the nature goddess us right there, and she’s right there. So, but, but in other words, how does it, and then my teacher’s tradition was all not to Raja. That’s another set of traditions and values. And then it’s a huge, expansive notion of the dancer. And of course he is neither masculine nor feminine, but is both.
And then plus one is something else you’re supposed to, as Rogers is both masculine is he’s called that concept are my traditions concept is called some Melena, which means commingled two things make a third thing. So every time you create a relationship in which you, you begin to stake out the beauty of an intimacy, clear boundaries, no limits. We know where we go. We know where we don’t. Then you and I have a third thing. We have our relationship, which is a gift to each other.
Now myself increases. Now you become a David taught to me because I see myself as you, but as more than me like that. So what, who are the gods? The gods are the ways in which we create a relationship in which the gifts of a world greater than ourselves become part of our conversation. Part of our narrative, part of our connectivity in a very practical sense.
Since everyone in this room can do something I can’t do. You are all Deva touts to me. You all bring light to a life in which your gifts become my assets. When we create a relationship rooted in the mutuality of that light, that’s what the word David tell means. Take you all the way, the word divinity, the sounds, what we’re beating to shine. When you bring the light of the gods, you bring the shadow possibilities. Now you’re going to really contract for cause the more brightly you burn, the more shadow you cast, right?
All of you who have done something that burns brightly means you’ve left behind plenty of shadow. The real question is, are you going to bring that to, and I want that you want all of you to be present light shadow darkness. All of that is David. The point of the day of attack to the tonic guy.
It’s the same as it is to the Hindu. And that is you are better off with it in the most explicit forms. So the ritual now is going to have who jobs like, we’re not just going to invoke entourage, and we’re going to have an entourage because the end here over on my side of the left side of the equation, you would have an Terajah for the evocative presence. In other words, that is you enter the ritual, not others on the right side, you would enter the ritual to accomplish a certain set of objectives.
Like we are moving along a path to a kind of realization in which here we’re going to, to this ignorance, we’re going to do this to fear. We’re going to do this to anger. You’re kind of plotting out and mapping out a strategy of empowerment. Well, and good move that far over to the other side.
And what you’re really doing is creating the opportunity of experience where you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you do know that when you enter into that scenario, something happens to you. Let me give you a really simple, stupid example of this because I am a child of rock and roll. But you know, like when your favorite song comes on, like it, it it’s evocative. It makes you think of someone, something, a scenario. Sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you cross and let you turn it off and don’t care. Sometimes you weep. But in the tradition, I was reared in.
Whatever happens to you is the point because you’re here to save her, the experience of being human. You’re not here to kind of get something, all the things you’ll get. You’ll get that’s all, that’s all kind of written into the imagery. He holds the fire of the solution in his right-hand heel to the drum of creation and fiber dissolution in his left, the drum of creation in his right. He sustains the world with his rearward leg. He offers grace for this, with his clingy potty, graceful upturned foot. He invites you to yoga.
Never, never be without fear. He reveals and conceals his heart. There’s a, there are a million stories of iconographic symbolism. All of that is gala.
Did we get the flavor of what’s going on here? Part that’s all just one thing. That’s all the first element of a five-part Richmond. That’s why we need the gods. We need the gods to tell us these stories and to evoke this experience, they play your song. The ones you really like. That’s like your tastes that’s through the ones you’re going to latch on to, but every God is connected to every other guy. Why? Because the second piece of this story, the second piece of the ritual is Mancha and Mancha is the code behind the browser and the code behind the browser.
The browser is the gods, the world you’re seeing. It’s the gods. That’s why the first advice I give you when you come to the temple with me is don’t close your eyes. You didn’t come to the temple to meditate with your eyes closed.
The temple is meditation with your eyes open. You didn’t have to do asset to get here. Just keep your eyes open. You want to see all the possibilities of the evocative experience. Just keep your eyes open. Every brick, every, every statue, every thing everyone who’s ever been here is here. Let it all seep in through all the senses. Synesthesia CLI see it, taste it, hear it, feel it, touch it, let it all in don’t that it’s because of the day, the top is called stool.
It’s the overt sense. It’s the outward form of every possible inner experience. That’s why there are so many of them. That’s why the slightest nuance and you know, like, well, this Ganesha is holding a Lotus, but that one is holding a news. Well, once you know the symbolic valence of all those particulars, thousands of them now, you’ve now, now, now, now pause here.
This is a really important point. We can deconstruct say not to Raja all day. So we’ll do it for you in a million ways. We’ll come back and just symbolically take them all apart. I’ll show you all five clips, five actions, five powers. The narrative goes on and on the myths will take us three, four days to tell we’re going to do not to Roger Pooja this summer at my house in Bristol at our summer camp. Come, it’ll be great. Good fun. I’ll teach you how to do this, but here’s the real point. Once you’ve kind of assimilated enough of the story, what I would do, but for, so if I came in to give you three weeks of 12 hours a day of the stories, myths, iconographies symbolisms of not to Raja.
I, all I would do is look at the image. Why? Because this is a zip file to me, right?
And what you’re really doing, like for, for you, you’re sort of learning this. You’re still unpacking this, but when you actually encounter the image, it’s all happening anyway. See what? Yeah. It’s a shot of the entire teaching. So the reason to have the gods is they are zip files. They’re a good stock of the entire body of lore. You may not know that you may have no idea what’s going on here. Why is this going to put the call petition to God? Why is this gone about the call? Um, what are the times about, you know, why is this, Ganesha this winter, that one, those all have stories and narratives and symbolisms.
But when you come in front of the image, it does something to you. And the reason it does that in Indian mind is that it holds the collective memory of all of that teacher.
It’s a repository of that lore of that symbolism of that entirety of historical content of symbolism. And what is it doing? It’s provoking your imagination. It’s delving into dream worlds and showing you passageways, but it’s really doing it’s, it’s holding the collective unconscious. It’s holding the summation of these possibilities. And what are the hinges doing? They’re telling it in 330 million different ways, each one, a different avenue alleyway into the subconscious unconscious realities on the very simple premise, the three-fourths of yourself is completely unrevealed to you.
Which means that when you come in front of the images, you don’t even have to know what they mean. They will do things to you because you’re literally in this case, looking at about 2200 years of, of symbolism in this form, which is holding the previous 2200 years easily. Now I’m not even exaggerating right. Of the cultures sensibility of what does it mean to be in a natural world, to be part of a social reality called community and culture, to have a human experience of conscience of one’s being, that’s a pretty grant, pretty grand agenda, but it really is access to the subtle experience of human possibility.
That’s their goal. The reason you would bring that in ritual so that you would do these things so that it would have something to you. Let me give you a different example. You know how like, like if you’re a real Mozart geek, I used to do this, I don’t do this anymore. You would like, I used to like study the libretto and the score before I would go to, which is my favorite one or Don Giovanni. But when I got there, I didn’t bring it with me and follow along. I just want to have the experience. Sometimes you laugh sometimes a cry.
Sometimes you like it. Sometimes you don’t, but you learn it not to like, just not for penetrate. You don’t learn it to kind of like, okay, I got it. You learn it to get it. And then you go and then you learn it to enjoy it, to love it, to have an experience, to let it be, to let it do something to you. Now, th the tantra claim is this the one who studies it and assimilates it and takes it seriously and really learns all about it has a better experience.
Just has more experience. Not because you’re going there going, Hmm, this was most probably hopper, but because all of that is inside. I could cellular at that point, you take, you assimilate the teaching and the wisdom, you know, you spend years studying it. And then when you have the, you have the rich wall, it just all unfolds for them. It all just speaks to you. And the idea is, well, if it’s going to do, it’s going to do, it’s like strange magic to you, whether or not you understand what’s going on, but the more you would understand what’s going on the richer, like the farther down into your mitochondria, it’s going to get like the further in the more it’s going to saturate your inner being, you’re going to actually access an imprint, your own unconscious experience.
That’s the day, the time.
And they want you to keep your eyes open and do the rituals over. Let’s call it. But here yod made the sacrifice be outward so that the transformation is the sacrifice. The sacred becomes inward. The second piece of the five or the month plus the month, quite simply are the code behind the browser. They are the streaming message system. They’re the sip, they’re their critic. They, they, and they work in criticality. They hold a certain kind of sequencing, body of information.
They function according to rules. Those rules have to do with repetition and initiation and how you learn them and how you recite them. But they, they are also evocative. So their power lies in message before meaning message before meaning it is, the sequence of sounds has, is in a, is, is a sequence of energy. The sequence of energy is no difference than say a sequence of DNA it’s code in these.
And that code works. Now, let me just give you a tiny little bit about how mantra works. Macho works by what’s called by principle called, called Monica Malini. Monica mountain is the little sophisticated, but it’s really cool. The word mark burka, M a T R K a mock Turka means it’s the diminutive of the word mother. It means little mother, Martha and Malini. M a L I M a L I N.
Hai means Garland. So motha Kamala means the Garland of little mothers. What are the little mothers? The little mothers are the 51 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet because all of them are ma are mocked. They’re the mother of the universe. Why? Because the universe is a body of energy that, that end folds and unfolds itself as a sequence of relationships. It sequences relationships, it tells you not anything can happen.
Things happened in a certain way, the certain way in which things happened, it’s called mafucka.
It goes the explanation of karma. It’s the explanation of order. Monica is what makes for Dharma a world that holds together. Why? Because the sequence of letters in sanscript begins with the first sound you can utter, which is the sound before the first letter of the alphabet. The first letter of the alphabet is the first sound you could utter. And that’s the short vowel way. Every subsequent letter is the next is, is literally literally the next letter in the sequence of sounds that sequence of 51 letters divides into sets.
There are valves and consonants, the consonants divide into seven sets of five plus three, and it’s now you’re off to the races. But the concept of Monica is that the world didn’t unfold. Anyway, it M it unfolded serially, successively, sequentially through a process of its own movements of articulation. Those movements come from. The Manteca works.
As you enunciated in your mouth, literally across your path from back to front, they go, they end. When they reach all the way to the front, they go all the way to the back and they create the next step. The next set. And then the next step. So you think of the Monica. Monica is this idea. The world is an orderly place in the unfolding sequence of energy. That creates a systematic body of information. And that’s exactly how the alphabet works. That’s the concept of Mazak, which means that the letters are always in the same order.
We call it up to shut up, shut up, which the word, it’s a play on words and what the word fuck should. I mean, indestructable meaning this is the way it always is, but it literally means from art to shop, which is the last sound and to get from Arctic Krisha and mafia is to follow the order of the alphabet.
Like that. There’s a way to do it. And the, in the Indian mind, this literally follows a set pattern. So the world didn’t happen. Anyway, it happened the way it did. Now, the reason it’s called Metallica, this is really fascinating is that it didn’t have to happen this way. This is just one way it could have happened, but this is the way it did happen. So think of Martha as these are the orderly rules of the world. Like this is what makes two and two, make four, hold up really well. This is what makes mathematical equations work out.
Why? Because it’s because, because it doesn’t tell you anything can happen. It tells you when things happen, they happen like this it’s reliability order. It’s that idea. Now, now it gets really interesting. Marvin’s name is, is the idea that any one of those 51 spots is simply an opportunity for any one of the 51 letters.
So Molly takes the order of the alphabet and says, as soon as you put a letter there, now you only have 50 letters left, but whichever one, but, but anyone. So, so think of it this way, mantra, because the idea that the order is fixed, Melanie is the idea that you’re at a slot machine, right? Uh, 51 spots, get it. And they’re all spinning. All 51 letters are on every wheel. And when the first one stopped, when anyone stops all that letter is out of the sequence.
Got it. So how many, how many versions of 51 letters could there be? Actually, I think it’s 51 factorial, right? So, but, but here’s the idea. The world is both orderly and it mutates and accidents happen. That is the sequence is utterly. The sequence is fixed except the sequence messes up, but the sequence doesn’t mess up by anything. The sequence messes up itself, get it the same way your DNA does it.
So what mantras do is they either perfectly sequence or they sequence with a principle of mutation and the mutation is called Molly and Molly is literally an accident, right? So monitors are called because what the mantras do is they keep reordering the world. But in a certain way, accidents creep in. If the accidents Creek didn’t creep in there wouldn’t be pollution.
There wouldn’t be growth. But the creeping in of accidents, isn’t necessarily always a good thing. Since most accidents fail, right? When it is a good thing, it’s a very good fit. So the mantras are the code. That’s creating the appearances. How does the code work order and randomness, but rent order doesn’t mean an order means a certain fixed sequence, but randomness doesn’t mean anything can happen. Randomness means the sequence doesn’t work out the same way every time, even though it’s supposed to.
Right, right. When your DNA goofs up, it’s the same four letters, right? It’s just that it doesn’t sequence properly. It’s the same idea in mantras. You can come back. We’ll talk about this at great length. We have a really good online course about mantras. If you want to learn really thick, dense explains all of this thoroughly and with a little less urgency than the clock is giving us right now. So monstrous the second piece. Why? Because you need the code that runs the system now mantra.
So it puts men. So, and the code is message before meaning, but the, but the mantras, because they’re tantric, I also have meanings because the mantras can also be words. Now, Ms. Shivaya salutations to shiver as a, so think of that basic mantra. Now, Ms. Shivaya salutations to shut up. That’s its meaning, but its mantra is not my shit.
Ah, yeah, that’s it. That’s the order of letters. That sequence creates that image. Literally Nama Shivaya is Shiva’s DNA. That’s his sequence. Got it. That’s the idea of the mantra. That should mean something. It means salutations to shut up. That’s that’s not the same thing as, as its message its messages. This thing is that sequence. Cause everything that is is a sequence of energies. That’s its message how you construe it.
What it means. That’s another level on top of that now. So now you have the two most important pieces you have the day about the gods who are the visualization of the narrative. And you have the monthlies, which are the code that creates everything you say. Now there are three other pieces and they’re very simple. Once you understand these, the next one is moodra moodra is the process by which you take what is outside and imprinted inside the word moodra I mean, DRA in seal or imprint, and you have to think, think the image I want you to have to take with you is literally of a wax seal.
You create a negative to a positive. So what you put outside, you take in and what you create inside, you put out the task of the ritual is to assimilate in print and then to imprint pack. You want the way you think and feel to imprint the world, to create contour its texture and understand depth and formulation. You want that world to do the same thing to you. So what mood was are traditionally in the rich wall, our gestures.
So the oral mudra, the moodra of mood. So undulating, mudra, Julius to moodra with Tada is awesome. We get what I just said. So to the awesome, the mountain pose, right? It’s the basis of all other poses undually is the basis of all other movies. So you don’t do this as a seal. This is a mojo. So Y so you’ll always hear me say, underline was you put the heart before the heart, because this is the Lotus of the heart, the way you do this move properly.
It’s like that one too. So that it looks like the folding of a Lotus and the unfolding of the, that you do it like butterfly fast. It looks like, just did that, but it’s actually 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and unfold. And here are the two stocks and there’s the muddy pond and there’s the EDA and the Pingala and then the middle. And here’s your heart card here. So you’re telling yourself again, you’re going back to the narratives, back to the symbolism.
But what you’re doing is you’re creating an imprint.
Now, all of them, all of the day of the they’ll have a sequence of moodra, right? Or they’ll have a particular motor like that’s Ganesha. So this is the elephant goad, and you hold it up in this direction and you can see that it’s the stick with the thing that, that he holds in his hand, it’s the UNHCR HSA, the goat, that kind of prods and pokes things around. It’s two uncautious facing each other, hold it down. And you can see that here’s his tusk and there’s his trunk. And there is two years, you get it running through the forest and I’ll put water spout.
Right? So, so moodra is gesture, right? It’s the way in which you think of a gesture now, as anything that you would make, like a gesture of friendship would be the way you look at someone or address someone, or you create an innuendo or a nuance of relationship because you’re creating an imprint.
You’re leaving an imprint. If I’ve left it with any imprint, I hope it’s authenticity. Like you got a little bit of the real me, right? I try not to like, be like, you’re saying, well, what’s the imprint. Like who do I think this person is? How do I create, how do we take outside the inside, inside out? How do I assimilate? That’s the practice of moodra yantra Yon. Mongola this word means device. These are the geometric designs, right? So the Tibetans make Tom because, you know, with all the celestial, but he saw was we really like triangles and squares and circles and other kinds of things, especially that famous Sri chakra, non interlacing triangles, five over facing four, Sue we’ll show these to you.
This is the heart of the ritual that I was reared in. You can map that onto your body can map that onto these are maps.
These are maps. What are the maps supposed to do? The maps always do maps, always do three things for you. They locate you. They tell you here not there. This is not that now not then. Right? They give you a way to orient. They create a sense of some apps are lock-in utopic and contrary. That would be a long story with their locket. If they tell you how to find your way around, I’m here. Not there they’re utopian because they take you to a place like, you know, like when you like, like watching a really great movie or getting into house of cards or game of Thrones or whatever you’re doing, this is a young truck you’re entering a world, get it.
You’re entering a whole structure. You’re entering an architecture of characters and thoughts and relationships. Right. And if it’s really good fiction or really good story inside that house, that’s why they’re called palaces and cities, young fellas, chakras, Mondelez they’re reels of consciousness.
Right? So they, they function as, as roadmaps, but then they function as places where when you go there, you enter that world. They’re very geeky. If you know what I mean? Like you can get very into, you know, like when you’re reading one of those books, like you’re in alert, like you are in all of you’re in the world, you’re in the, you know, the map of middle earth. Well, it either tells you like, either look at the map to go, oh yeah, order’s over there. That’s flocking. But it’s utopia. Like you’re in middle earth.
Get it. And you’re kind of, oh yeah, there are dragons and dwarves and elves lightsabers and whatever world you’re in. Penny, penny, penny, whatever world. They’re like watching a big bang. That’s a yantra getter. What? I mean like you’re inside a world. That’s a utopic world because you live inside that construct.
Contrarian is that, is that the contrarian map is one that shows you that what a ritual does is it points out the relationship between the way things are and the way you wish they were, the way things are. And the story you’re telling, which is, which is not the same. Let me give you an, we get a very simple example. Anybody ever been to communion? Yeah. Well, yeah. They put the little wafer in your mouth, right? And they say, OD hop Corpus ma’am, which is what they would say.
If they were saying any black, this is my body. Right. Which is a little bit, which is where the term Hocus Pocus comes from. Why is this Hocus Pocus? Because he didn’t put the body. He didn’t put a piece of Christ in my mouth. He put fish food. It used to be fishery. Now it’s like the Protestants make it like whole grain bread or some bullshit.
Sounds got to be gluten free. Right? It’s communion. Gluten-free now that’s something Christian should argue about. But my point is that it points out the difference between what you’re told that is and what it is. Get it. In other words, the ritual doesn’t solve a problem. That’s what a locket of map does. A ritual doesn’t end. Does it only get you into a world? That’s what a utopic map does. A ritual tells you that what you’re doing is, is, is not what you’re doing.
Get it, it points out this discrepancy. It makes, which is a cause to think about it. Because when somebody says, you know, bless your heart. Like congratulations at a wedding. That’s a contrarian thing. Because on the one hand, they mean it on the other hand, it’s like, what does that mean? Right. It opens it up to the conversation. The more exaggerated example is this is my body.
And you go, wait a second. That turf like fish. Right. But you know that the story counts. So the relationship between what you’re being told and what you have to construe it to be is an opportunity for meaning, right. To opportunity for contemplation. But it’s an incongruity. Cause you go, it’s like, when the know we’re about to go to graduation, you’re going to stand up. And I’m going to say with all the rights and privileges conferred to you, by the degree to which you are recorded, would you like fries with that?
I mean, I’m going to say like, that’s what the president is going to say. And you’re going to sit down here. They’re going to go do something just happened. Like what the hell? Just that I don’t feel any different or do I, or you go, I feel really like, you know, if you’ve ever like you like the reason to get married is that when you go through the ritual, you’ll go, wait a second.
Nothing really happened. Except I feel completely different. Except something really happened. Except I feel really different. Is everybody clear about this? What we’re getting. So that’s a contrarian ritual. It’s an opportunity. It’s a boxer engine. It’s an opportunity to go, wait a second. Something is happening here. Yeah. This put the symbol creates an opportunity of causality is opportunity of this because it’s a ritual because you’re doing something. Let me give you, let me, let me, let me summarize so we can leave. Cause we need to leave. Right? It’s five or five 30, something like that.
Yeah, fine. Okay. When you come with me, come with me because this is the most fun you can have wearing a sari. I promise I’ll wear a sari when we do it next time. Right? And you can wear a Doti all the rules. So, but when we go into the Hindu temples, I always say to the pilgrims, I go, look, leave your eyes open.
I only give you a handful of instructions because it’s a no belief to belief, free zone. As a tantric zone, you’re going to find DaVitas and mantras and mudras. Everyone’s going to make various gestures and movements, right? And you’re going to feet. You’re going to find yantras big structures and worlds and maps. You’re going to see all of this stuff. And I’m going to say, look, when you see them, do the ritual to the day in the temple, you’re going to, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to say to yourself, either something very sublime is going on or these people are playing with dolls.
And the answer to that is yes. So that’s the see the incongruity. There are the fifth part. I said there were five. It was David mantra. Moodra yantra right. So there’s the gods. The mantra code, the mood gesture, the unthread, the worlds, and the fifth part is called Neassa Nya. LSA, which means, which means putting it on yourself means wearing it literally means leading it out that is put it on.
And the ASA is you become the gods. This is you. And the ASA is that’s me. You lay all the mantras on your hands and on your body, you lay your mantra in the mind, you lay it all out, you exchange it, you imprint it in it. You interconnect with it. Neassa you lay it out. You systematically lay it at. And then you say, and then you can either lay it out with purposes and goals and meanings, which you can have, or you can lay it out and go, I wonder what will happen.
And I guess to me, the answer is yes. And the richer that project becomes and the more you sort of endeavor to learn the more it’s and it’s like, anything else, like the more fluent this becomes, the more sort of the less, the less strange and exotic it is, but it really, all it is, is a way in a certain way of asking yourself, where am I? Where am I in this world? And what do I want? And how would I Orrick? And really the core of it is this simple time for that is the way in which you extend and traverse the power of relationship, everything about being human.
It’s creating a relationship with value and that’s what kind of religion. And this is simply a series of strategies, techniques, images, projects that create relationships with valley. They tell through essentially the mechanisms of body, speech, mind, but the mechanisms of symbolic consciousness, where the Indians really Excel it’s right there. You know, like if we want to know more about ourselves, we have to uncover the recondite mysterious three quarters of ourselves.
We don’t access. And the question is how to get there. And these folks said, this is a really interesting and compelling way to access your imagination, your dreams and your unconscious, which to which we all belong. Okay. Thanks a million. Thanks for coming.
There are courses online. If you want to take them there’s courses on tantra and she had a Sutra Kashmiri, Shai bites. There’s one on mantra. That’s a really good one on Venetia, right? To me, there is a summer camp. There’s four days of immersion in Bristol, New York, near our house, which we make eminently affordable. We do one over the 4th of July, one in August, right? To me, I’ll send you the info. It’s really, really fun. There are people just like you from all over the world that come, they come from all over the world and it’s a blast to learn together. And we go to India and, and come before it’s gone and I’ll take you places you can’t believe.
It’s really good. Fun. Thank you so much. The reason I make that invitation is you’ve made such an invitation to come. Thank you so much for your time and effort. So grateful. So happy. Thanks for getting me out of the house.