How is 'God' a Near Enemy of the Truth?

What are ‘near enemies to the truth’?  Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.

Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that all-too-brief introduction, let’s turn to this month’s Near Enemy. [What follows is an edited transcript of a live teaching session.]

GOD

The concept of God becomes a Near Enemy of the Truth only in some traditions, like that of nondual Shaiva Tantra. Other traditions teach that there really is a superhuman being that they call God and who often goes by specific names in those various traditions such as Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, Krishna, and many other possible names. India became famous in the West for its nondual philosophies found in Vedānta, Tantra and so on, but India has played host to every imaginable form of spirituality and religion. The conception of God that most Christians and most Muslims have is also found in the South Asian tradition, for example in the Gaudiya Vaishnava lineages known in the West as the ‘Hare Krishnas’.

Many religious traditions, both Eastern and Western, argue that their interpretation of sacred texts is authoritative—it is the only correct way to interpret that text, whether the Bible or the Bhagavad-gītā. But most sacred texts gained a wide currency precisely because of the fact that they are amenable to many possible interpretations, and thus became a locus of authority for religious groups with very different philosophies and theologies.

If we look at the Bhagavad-gītā, for example, we find that it has received diverse interpretations that argue for mutually incompatible views, such as theological dualism on the one hand and philosophical nondualism on the other. This incites vigorous debates, especially when the debaters assume that the original meaning of the text at the time of its authorship is the most authoritative, and therefore they strive mightily to show that their particular view exists in the text itself, not only in their interpretation of it.

If you read the Bhagavad-gītā on its own terms, we find that it teaches neither theological dualism (the view that God constitutes a separate being, a supernatural person to whom humans owe allegiance) nor philosophical nondualism (the view that the concept of God is nothing but a man-made symbol for universal Consciousness, which constitutes the fundamental nature of every human being or even the fabric of reality itself). Rather, it teaches a view known in India as the bhedābheda view, that God exists within everything but does not constitute the whole of reality. God is, on this view, the best and brightest and most essential part of everything, but not the whole of everything. (We find this view also in the ancient West, for example amongst the Gnostics who flourished in the Hellenistic period.) God is the divine spark in man, the best and highest aspect of our humanity, but not the messy or ugly parts of our humanity. God is all things bright and beautiful, exclusively.  You see this taught in the Gītā at length: Krishna says (in chapter 10), “Among heavenly bodies, I am the Sun; among mantras, I am OM, among warriors I am Arjuna, among trees, I am the mighty Banyan tree,” and the list goes on and on. What He’s saying is, “I’m the best example of every class, and the most essential part of any given entity.” That’s the bhedābheda doctrine, the view that God is in everything but does not constitute the whole of everything. On this view, God is not your thoughts or emotions, but only your soul, which is the spark of the divine within you. That’s why Krishna says “All beings rest in me, but I do not abide in them,” (9.4) meaning that beings are dependent on Him for their existence but He does not constitute the whole of their being.

This is markedly different from the nondual view which we could call abheda, if we're contrasting it to the previous term, but is also called advaita in Sanskrit: the view that states that God is everything. God or divine consciousness is instantiated as the whole of reality. Some nondualists don’t use the word God at all, wishing to emphasize that the divine is not a person of any kind, but rather an impersonal or transpersonal universal consciousness. For example, both Buddhists and advaita Vedāntins strive to avoid theological language. The Vedāntins will say that Brahman, the Absolute, is all that exists and the apparent existence of anything else is an illusion or a cognitive error. Nondualistic Buddhists say that everything has (or is) Buddha-nature (though if you investigate the descriptions of Buddha-nature, you may conclude that this statement is equivalent to saying that everything is God). By contrast, the Shaivas (the followers of the religion of Shiva & Shakti) not only used but emphasized theological language, constantly employing terms like Maheshvara (the Great Lord) or Parādevī (the Supreme Goddess) when discussing the fundamental nature of reality.[1] Despite the literal meaning of these terms, the nondualist Shaiva Tantrikas did not use them to refer to a superhuman person at the top of a cosmic hierarchy, since they explicitly taught that nothing exists which is not God. If everything—but really, everything—is God, then we’re clearly dealing with a different definition of the word than followers of the Abrahamic religions are accustomed to.  

Why use the word God at all when they could have said (and often did say) that everything is consciousness? Why did they need to deify consciousness? There’s a historical answer to this question, namely that these enlightened Tantrikas inherited a thoroughly theological religious tradition that they reinterpreted within the context of a nondual philosophy. They couldn’t dispense with the tradition that they inherited, even if some elements of it were incompatible with their enlightened awareness, but they could, and did, radically reinterpret its terminology.

But there was also a purely spiritual reason to retain this theological language: it allowed them to concisely allude to their view on the nature of consciousness, which is as follows. Consciousness is, in its real nature, unbounded, radically free, unconstrained and uncircumscribed by space, time, and form, to which it is prior, constituting the condition within which those features of experience manifest. Despite being the most intimate aspect of every individual’s experience, consciousness is transpersonal, meaning that it is the same in all beings, and it is prior to individuality, not the product of it. Now consider how people use the words ‘God’ or ‘divine’ throughout the ages. These terms nearly always carry connotations of expansive power and freedom, a being or state of being that is unbounded, unlimited, unconstrained, and is therefore omnipresent. The Tantrik masters deified consciousness both because they considered it the most salient and significant aspect of reality and because they recognized that its characteristics matched those that had traditionally been attributed to the putative Supreme Being. In fact, by using this language, they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) suggested that in venerating a Supreme Being, humankind had all along been simply projecting the intrinsic yet unrecognized features of their own consciousness onto an imaginary entity conceived of as separate.

There’s yet another reason to use God-language instead of dispensing with it. Nothing exists which is not God is also a way of asserting that everything is worthy of reverence or devotion. These terms are much misunderstood today. Devotion is not an amplified version of liking or approving. Asserting that everything is worthy of reverence does not mean that everything is worthy of your approval. It’s a different frame of mind altogether, and a much deeper one. It’s a posture of awareness in which reverence for the pattern of the whole, as instantiated in each and every one of its parts, reveals the innate beauty and blessing power of existence manifested in everything, including even in experiences that we might find challenging, difficult, or upsetting. The attitude of devotion or reverence is a powerful attitude on the spiritual path that can unveil the innate beauty and intrinsic blessing power of any experience. It reshapes our experience of reality in such a fundamental way that anyone who has ever been exposed to theological language can’t resist using it to refer to this paradigm of being.

In the tradition of nondual Shaiva Tantra, there was a great master, a philosopher-poet-sage named Utpaladeva. He was a towering intellect in the history of Sanskrit literature and he was a radical nondualist. He argued that there is no separate God or divinity whatsoever, but rather God is instantiated as the totality of consciousness: that which makes all experience possible. It is the consciousness of all conscious beings, that by virtue of which they are conscious, to whatever degree. Since the objects of consciousness are only knowable as aspects of consciousness, they are nothing but consciousness in particular modalities. Therefore, the universal consciousness that he called God has two aspects, the context for experience (consciousness itself) and the substance of experience (the modalities of consciousness). Utpaladeva argued at length, and with astonishing clarity and precision, for this nondual vision of God, thereby giving the Shaiva Tantrik tradition its indigenous name, which (translated from Sanskrit) means ‘the way of the absolute nonduality of the supreme divinity’ (parameśvarādvayavāda).

But—and this is the surprising part—Utpaladeva was also a devotional poet. When you read his poetry, it’s full of devotional language like ‘Oh Shiva, may I praise you all day long, may I revel in devotion to you’. He repeatedly uses the second person person ‘you’. Modern readers tend to be far more literalist than premodern readers, and so if they only read his poetry, they are likely to assume that Utpaladeva was a dualist since he addresses God as someone separate from himself. However, in light of his philosophical work we must conclude that he is playing a kind of language game in which pronouns are in truth completely fluid realities: one can use any pronoun because they all refer to one and the same being in a nondual view. Utpaladeva poetically celebrated consciousness in its awakened self-aware mode. He used the word ‘God’ as a literary convention to eulogize awakened awareness, which also allowed him to play in a nondual mode with the reader—in using the pronoun ‘you’, he was breaking the fourth wall as it were, addressing the reader in their real nature. “May I exult in praise of you all day long, O Blessed One!” There is an opportunity for realization here on the part of the reader: “Oh, he’s addressing me! Not the mental construct of me, but me as the unbounded power of awareness, already intrinsically free.”  He is addressing your your essence-nature, the most fundamental aspect of you, that field of awareness-presence which is unborn, undying and unaffected by all the various aspects of experience that pass through it.

The tradition of Shaiva Tantra plays endlessly with the language of God or divinity because of the way it inspires reverence and love, which are key elements of the spiritual path for most people. Yet it remains a Near Enemy, because it’s so easy to reify God into something separate, whether it’s conceived as a separate being or just the Universe as something separate from you.

In the final analysis, what does this tradition say about the nature of God? It says that whether you call it God, or the Absolute, or the Infinite, or Divine Consciousness, there is only one Self of all beings. So when this tradition uses the word God, it means something like transindividual awareness, the one consciousness by virtue of which all conscious beings are conscious to whatever degree that they are. And that degree can change. In the spiritual life, the degree to which you participate in the one consciousness changes over time, it pulsates, it expands and contracts and expands yet further.  

The lineage of nondual Shaiva Tantra sums up the nature of the Divine in two words: viśvarūpa and viśvottīrna. The first term means that the singular Divine Consciousness is manifest as the totality of perceptible phenomena: the body of God is the entire universe, one could say, everything you can touch, taste, hear, see, smell, feel, or think about. The second term means that consciousness also transcends everything: there’s an aspect of this One which is not touchable, tasteable, smellable, hearable, or think-about-able. This transcendent aspect escapes all language and all the ordinary senses. It can be sensed only in a supersensory sort of way that’s impossible to describe to one who hasn’t had the experience.

One of my teachers summed up this doctrine (which some philosophers call panentheism) in an easy way to remember: “God is more than meets the eye but it’s also everything the eye can meet”—where ‘eye’ is of course standing in for all the senses, and ‘God’ is just a useful term to describe both aspects of the one universal Awareness-Presence.

Here I’ll use some metaphorical language to try to point to the experience of the transcendent consciousness, so that those who’ve had the experience can recognize it and perhaps reactivate it. In meditation, you can sometimes tune into, sense and feel the formless presence pervading everything. But you don’t have to wait for meditation. There’s a quiet, formless presence, right here right now, pervading everything, within and without. This presence is not different from you, and not separate, but it’s also so much more than your habitual sense of self. We could say it’s your very own power of awareness, shorn of selfhood, shorn of limitation. This formless presence is not personal, it doesn’t belong to you as a person per se and yet it’s ever so intimate.

Furthermore, it’s as if everything, everywhere, every object, every feeling, everything, is being tenderly held by this vast quiet presence. It doesn’t really make logical sense, but it’s as if this quiet presence is just behind everything, subtly supporting it, but also pervading everything. It is always just barely out of sight, and yet it’s abiding as the very substance of everything. Notice how this formless quiet presence is somehow tenderly holding everything with—if we had to give it a name—something like infinite love. Yet the word love doesn’t quite fit, because there’s no separation here, there’s no one being loving another, but rather the formless presence somehow is love—or that’s the closest word we have to it. It’s simple, quiet presence, showing up for the whole of existence. It is infinite love holding everything in every moment. Right now, you might feel it, if you just relax into your back body as if you are melting backwards into the embrace of someone you can trust absolutely.  Then you melt a little deeper, and you might feel that the formless presence is holding you and it is you but it’s also more. Everything is held in this sacred silence, a silence so deep that nothing could possibly ever disturb it. Pain does not negate it, death does not negate it, and nothing is needed to affirm it. This whole universe is possible because of it and never ever has anything been unheld by it. When you feel small, it is vast and it is holding you in perfect presence whether you feel it or not. When you feel vast: that it is you and you are it, and there is only the One ever manifesting itself in countless different forms. When you forget, and then you remember that you forgot, you can simply breathe and relax into the back body, melt back and feel the formless presence is there tenderly holding you as it always has and always will, and if all separation melts and you are that formless presence, that quiet sacred silence, great, and if not you get to be held by it. It’s perfect either way. It is tenderly holding me if I’m experiencing ‘me’ as a body-mind, but at any moment the experience of me as body-mind can dissolve and then I am that vast formless presence holding everything. Once you’ve awakened to it, in any given moment you can feel yourself held by it, or you can be it, holding everything.

So that’s my attempt to point out the truth to which the concept of God is a near enemy. As words, as concepts, this attempt can only fail. But if you take those words as metaphors, as pointers, perhaps you experientially glimpse what they’re pointing to.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Interestingly, radically nondual authors like Abhinavagupta and Kshemarāja used masculine and feminine names for the Divine (which we translate into English as ‘God’ and ‘the Goddess’) interchangeably. In some contexts, both names are used, to highlight complementary aspects of the One Consciousness. In other contexts, just one name was used to designate the entirety of Consciousness, in which case either one met the need.

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS on this topic from a live teaching session (please forgive typos)

Student: I was taught that dvaitādvaita meant that this reality is both dual and non-dual.

Hareesh: Yes, that's correct. How this view is not contradictory is actually quite simple: God is in everything as the essence of everything but doesn't constitute the whole of everything. So there are things that are not God. This is pretty easy for people to understand because a lot of people instinctively hold this view whether or not it's true. A lot of people feel, for example, their so-called negative emotions (in the non-dual view we don't believe in that term) anger, jealousy, and certain thoughts are not God. They can believe, however, that their beautiful thoughts and sacred experiences are God and everything else isn't. This view is very often strongly held even if it's not consciously spelled out.

Abheda or advaita is the view that everything is God, and everything is equally God. Everything is equally the one divine Consciousness, and the things that you consider beautiful or enjoyable or pleasurable are not more divine than anything else in this radically nondual view. 

There's a nondual teaching in the lineage that I follow, the Trika Pratyabhijñā lineage, which is that higher non-duality includes and validates duality as a legitimate level of experience, a legitimate manifestation of consciousness. What does that mean? Simply this: if you're experiencing God or the divine as something separate from you, you start there. This higher nondual tradition teaches that if you experience a higher power, if you experience god as a reality higher than what you think of as you, then your prayer is legitimate. Pray to that higher power insofar as you perceive that there is a higher power, even though you may ultimately realize later on that that higher power is nothing other than your true nature. In your true nature, you are vast, you contain multitudes, to quote Walt Whitman, what you are encompasses the whole universe. When you think you’re just this little person, this little body-mind over here, this little creature, your ultimate higher nature is going to seem to you like something vastly greater than you because you're so identified with something small.  Later you might have the realization and this doesn't work as a belief so please don't try to believe this but you might have the direct realization that what you are is unbounded, unlimited consciousness encompassing everything and within that consciousness appears a body-mind called Hareesh or whatever. I'm not defined by that appearance within consciousness any more than I'm defined by any other appearance within consciousness. If you have that realization that there's no higher power, there's also no lower power. Higher and Lower cease to be meaningful but prior to that realization they are meaningful you if you experience yourself as a body-mind named so-and-so, as the vast majority of humans do. There is a higher power and even though it may happen that you realize later that the higher power is you, is your true nature, and that you're not so-and-so after all, as you thought, but that's just a persistent, proximate appearance within consciousness. So if you are experiencing a higher power, which many people do if they have an experience of god, that’s something higher, deeper, broader, more powerful than ‘me’ then you can leverage that experience on your spiritual path. For example, the 12 Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous and other such recovery programs leverage a very powerful teaching to free them from addiction because when you're in the grips of addiction it can really help. Not that they need to appeal to that higher power in order to become free of their addiction but    because they say ‘I'm helpless in the face of my addiction and I appeal to this higher power’ and then they can have an experience of grace. This is a very real experience. Obviously, if you don't have any religious sentiment this part doesn't really work and it's been shown that for people who have no religious sentiment AA is not a very effective recovery method, but for those who do, it is effective. They know they can't control their addiction and it’s out of their hands so they appeal to a higher power and if that appeal is genuine, they have an experience of grace rushing in. According to this view, that grace is not actually coming from some separate superhuman person, it's not coming down from above. In the non-dual view, the grace is actually surging up from deep within your own being. When you are open to the power of grace, grace arrives and it's not because you are good and therefore big daddy in the sky says, ‘here's your reward for being good’, it's a great grace it's that you. When you're ready to open to the power of your innate divinity it arrives but it doesn't matter if you call that higher power or not. What matters is that you're appealing to that which is beyond your conditioned body-mind as it's the conditioned body-mind that's addicted. You have to appeal to something beyond the conditioned body mind. In that context, prayer is meaningful, devotion to a higher power is meaningful and opening to grace that is meaningful, even if later, it ends up not being so.

One of my favorite nondual awake people, who's not a teacher, shared how on his awakening journey, before he arrived at effortless abiding awakening, he was stuck. He ended up finding himself praying even though he had already experienced and almost constantly experienced that the divine is not separate, that there is nothing separate and that there is no superhuman person. He had already seen that truth and yet he was stuck and he found himself praying. He said he didn’t use a name for god but addressed ‘it’ in the second person pronoun. He found himself saying,  ‘I know that I am what you are, and you are what I am, and nevertheless here I am saying help. Show me the way. I'm praying to myself, in a sense, but I don't know what else to do.  Even then, in that context of rigorously not believing in any separate divinity, nonetheless, that appeal was powerful and it was successful in opening him beyond that point of his own stuckness.

There’s a long Sanskrit phrase, parameśvarādvaya-vāda, which is the precise term given by Abhinavagupta when he's teaching the non-duality of supreme divinity in this inclusive way that includes duality as a valid level of experience. 

Student: What causes that disintegration of the experience or awareness of the one yet an overly identified relationship with the individual self?

Hareesh: Well, first of all, there is no disintegration. There never was, there never could be. So then, what you're asking is, ‘what causes the false perception of disintegration’. That's a big topic that I have attempted to answer in the Recognition Sutras but there is no short answer. Delusion is what's complicated, it's really complicated, and truth is that which cannot be simpler. Again, when we try to put it into words, it doesn't sound simple, but that's only a function of what our language was built to do and not do.  

The category of me exists in the mind. The mind says, ‘this is me, that is not me’ but if you subtract that mental categorization, which for most of us happens so constantly that we don't even realize it's happening, if we can lay aside that mental categorization of me and not me what do we find, in direct experience, is no such boundary and that's non-duality. It couldn't be more simple and it's pointing you towards what's true in your direct experience every moment and yet unnoticed because you assume that your mental categories are inherent in reality itself instead of realizing that they're mental categories. You've got a mental category called ‘me’ which probably includes: body; thoughts; feelings; memories; emotions; and stuff like that and another mental category of ‘not me’ which includes everything else. If you can drop that for even a few seconds, what you find is a single field of energy or a single field of consciousness, depending on what terminology makes more sense to you, a single field undivided of phenomena arising and subsiding within consciousness. You discover that ‘me’ versus ‘not me’ exists only in the mind. The same goes for every ‘good versus bad’ which is found only in the mind but the mind projects it onto everything. So you see, non-duality is the simplest thing. It just is reality minus all your projected mental concepts. It's incredibly simple and when it comes to trying to explain how we end up deluded and confused about the nature of reality, that's complicated. Jed Mckenna says, quite rightly, says if you understand the nature of Maya (Maya is this power by which The One conceals itself within plurality) then you see Maya is the greatest wonder. Reality is simple, it's almost shockingly, beautifully simple whereas Maya is endlessly complex. He uses the metaphor of Maya as a goddess, which the Shaiva Tantra tradition does as well, you’ve just gotta admire her as she's amazing   because we contrive to fool ourselves in endless different ways. There's only one way to be in truth but there are endless ways to be in delusion.

Student: What actually do you think the awakened sages through the ages experienced?

Hareesh: They tell us what they experienced but you can't, probably, parse their words very accurately unless you've tasted it yourself. Just like if somebody describes the taste of a mango, and you've had a mango, you can relate to the description, even if you've only tasted a mango once in your life, you will relate to a good description of the taste of a mango. If you've never tasted a mango it doesn't matter how good the description, it's not really going to convey it. They tell us what they experienced and anyone who's tasted even the outer edges of that experience, for a moment, can recognize it. 

From the point of view of Shiva Tantra, god is a near enemy because we play endlessly with the language of god or divinity because of the way it inspires devotion and reverence which are key elements of the spiritual path. Yet it's a near enemy because it's so easy to reify god into something separate, a separate superhuman person of some kind. As we've seen in other entries in the near enemy series, such as ‘Everything happens for a reason’ is a kind of disguised dualistic theological statement that god has a plan for you and you should trust it. In this tradition, we argue there is no such separation, that there is no superhuman being but there's a lot more to reality than meets the eye as well. 

In the Upanishads, almost in childlike language, it is said that the one infinite being is this entire universe but extends ten fingers beyond it or 10 hand widths beyond it. That's not meant to be taken literally, let's just say it's something more. Now we would say in this tradition it's infinitely more. What you can experience right now, about the nature of reality everywhere, within and without, absolutely everywhere, is this formless presence exists as your very own power of awareness. It is somehow something more as well. This formless presence is not personal, it doesn't belong to a person per se and yet it's intimate.

There is a beautiful metaphor that many of you have heard called Footprints, where somebody's dying in the story and their life flashes before their eyes and they see all the scenes from their life. They see a beach with footprints and they see all the scenes from their life flashing before their eyes and projected into the sky. They see there are two sets of footprints walking always together. This is the apparently dualistic part of the story, but there are two sets of footprints and they realize, ‘oh that's me and god’. God has walked with me through my whole life, and then they notice that at the most difficult times of their life, the most painful times, there's only one set of footprints. They ask god, ‘wait what is this? At the worst times, the hardest times of my life, you abandoned me? There's only one set of footprints’. God says, ‘my child don't you see it was in those moments that I carried you’. It moves me to tears because it's really true. You can feel completely lost and abandoned and that you have no one. You come to see that it's not true and you are able to look back you and you'll see that when you thought you were all alone, you were tenderly held in this infinite unconditional loving presence, which is your true nature and yet in some paradoxical way we can't even understand is holding us.

A student, at the end of a retreat with me, recognized the non-dual truth but it caught her completely off guard because it's nothing like what she expected!  She had this idea about what everyone said that god is everything god is in everything, non-dual and blah blah but when she was recognizing that, when she opened her eyes and saw that very presence in everything, she came to me and said, but it's my own presence that's in everything! I said, ‘what do you think we've been talking about this whole time’? She said, ‘I went to the toilet and then I went to flush the toilet and I looked at the shine on the metal handle of the toilet flush and I saw my presence in that shining! Then I saw it everywhere!’. When that happens, when that clicks for you that it's your presence in everything, you can see that presence is in everything you see: you look at the clouds you see yourself, you taste a fig and you taste yourself.  You don't know that it's your presence in everything until you look at it, or hear it, or taste it, or touch it.

When Adyashanti shared about when it happened to him, in his book Emptiness Dancing, he was seeing that what I am appearing as everything and that the One is everything. He thinks, ‘I wonder if it's the toilet?’ and he goes into the bathroom to check! It delights you and it catches you by surprise. When you're having the direct experience, you've got to look again at everything to recalibrate as you're looking with the eyes of eternity. It's so simple, so sweet and beautiful, just look at anything and just see it's what you are appearing as that. You hear a sound and it's what you are appearing as that. Everything else is a dream. You dream that you're unawake, you dream that you're a separate self. At any time the dream can end and you look and see everything is what you are appearing as that. If you need the thought then it hasn't happened yet, it’s still a concept. do you see what I mean if you need the thought if you've got to cue yourself with the thought it hasn't happened yet you're still in the concept, which is fine.

Student: I visited Pondicherry and visited Sri Aurobindo's room and felt incredible power there, can you speak to that?

Hareesh: some places have energy, that have a particular kind of quality palpable energy but the mind mistakes that for god or consciousness or divinity. When you recognize non-dual reality, you'll realize it is equally manifesting as everything and there is literally nothing that is not. For many years, I experienced some places as more spiritual than others and some places I could feel divine consciousness more than others. I was completely deluded that what I was experiencing was the externalization of my concept of god, my mental projection. If I was around my guru, or I was in an ashram or temple, those settings facilitated my projection. I could project my concept of god successfully on my environment and think I'm experiencing god but no because it's equally everywhere and everything. Nothing is more it than anything else.

Student: At the beginning of my journey, I also had a moment where I felt one with the water swishing in my toilet and started weeping.

Hareesh: When you experience kind of a moment of unity in a temple, it's kind of expected but when you experience it in relation to the last place you expect to experience it, like the toilet, it catches you off guard. That the key as it could be anywhere really and it could be anything!  These moments catch us off guard where we don't expect to see it and they are significant.

Student:  I had moments where I experienced being presence and being everything around me and for these experiences I could perceive that I am everything and everything is me but these experiences fade in a certain period of time. Then the perception that I am everything and everything is me becomes more like a mental concept.

Hareesh: Nobody can predict whether any specific aspect of awakened awareness will become constant for you in this life. It's possible to have abiding non-dual awareness where there's no subject-object differentiation anymore, it just never happens anymore but it's not that it's not really that important whether it that experience is constant or not. The point is that there's some aspect that is constant in your direct experience. It's just about investigating that aspect. In Bhavana meditation, you can tune into, sense and feel the formless presence pervading everything. It is tenderly holding me if I'm experiencing me as a body-mind but at any moment the experience of me as body-mind can dissolve and then I am that vast formless presence holding everything. From my perspective it doesn't really matter which is happening because they're both wonderful - I'm being held in the infinite presence or I am the infinite presence.  One or the other is constantly available now for you. Something I can also promise you, something that is constantly available, is  the still point at the center. This is the silence underlying all the thoughts. There's some aspect of the One, of the infinite, of god, that's available to all of you on the awakening journey. Once the awakening journey has started, there's some aspect of the One that’s available, it's just a matter of finding which aspect it is. 

Maybe more aspects become available but until you land in this kind of place where you recognise there is no ‘you’. There is a lack of subject-object differentiation, this is the simplest way to put it and that's wonderful. You don’t need to be experiencing that all the time as there are so many other wonderful aspects of the one to experience. 

The mind becomes more silent in proportion to how completely you've realized that thoughts are almost entirely insignificant. When you see that the truth is not found in the realm of thought, that thoughts are only tools and not truths (and they're not even tools it's often just noise), when you stop attributing significance to thoughts, the mind quietens down and slows down very very naturally. The reason that you have lots of thoughts that cover you up is because you're giving them attention all the time and you're thinking they're significant. There's a clue: you think your thoughts are significant thoughts because they declare their own significance to themselves. Get free of that attribution of significance and the mind becomes very quiet and it's lovely! 

Can you recognize the one in and as that thought energy? The one manifests as everything. Take your nondual attention and turn it on your thoughts and you realize: ‘oh my gosh, I've been thinking that thoughts are true when they're just vibrations of energy!’ You get sucked in just like you get sucked into a TV drama or a soap opera and you react as if it's real. Something happens dramatic on the screen and you're like: ‘oh my god!’   and if somebody comes along and says that it’s not real, it's just light on a screen, you tell them to shut up because you’re enjoying it even though you're freaking out. That's a scary   but that's what we do all the time, that's what we do with life, that's what we do with thoughts. When you get drawn into the thought it is just energy, just like everything else is energy and everything is the one, manifest as that energy.

Student: when you can constantly stay with the non-dual perspective and perceiving presence does the process of the conditioning and releasing samskaras and like stop or no there's still like both things at the same time you still have conditioning but you can also perceive supreme reality?

Hareesh: Yes you still have conditioning but any bit of it can drop at any moment. This has to happen in real-time but when you're in non-dual mode, if you look, you'll see, ‘everything that sticks around is because I’m holding on to it!’ Everything that's stuck around, for however many years, even though you don't realize you're doing it, is because you're holding on to it. You pin it in place for a while with self-images stories. In the nondual mode, you just could take a look at a samskara and realize, ‘oh my gosh, I'm holding it!’ and realise you don't need to do that and it dissolves and digests. You realize that you were thinking that this little piece of pain you’ve been carrying around was you but you don't need to think that anymore. If you want to dissolve a whole bunch of some samskaras, you need to look at each one in that mode. One of my teachers says that everything seeks the light and the light is non-judgmental, non-dual awareness or unconditional loving presence. That's the light everything seeks. Nothing can dissolve until it's bathed in that light but it's that simple, just take a look at it from that perspective. If the conditioning is still there it’s because the holding is unconscious. You've got a million little fists holding a million little pieces of unresolved experience and you're so used to holding them. Why would you stop just because you're in a non-dual state? You just take a look, ‘Oh, there I am, holding on to something that I don't need to’ and boom, then you're not. It's very natural to open and say that you don't need to hold onto that and it immediately starts dissolving into the river of consciousness or the river of life, and then it feels like a little relief or something involved with that, even though it's not wrong to be holding to it but it is a kind of tension. When you're abiding in the non-dual state you also know that none of that has to happen. That's a nice thing to do, to take a look at some things and let them go but don't feel like it has to happen because everything is the one and you're perfect. You couldn't be unperfect no matter how much healing you have had to do. Even the samskaras are the One!

Student: How do you harness it in your daily life? I know I can pray. 

Hareesh: You can't harness anything. Look, it depends on which direction you're praying to, as prayer can reinforce duality and separation. If you pray to the higher power to dissolve your sense of separateness, that's a very different thing from saying give me what I want. There's another sort of prayer to ask to let me see a deeper truth that will recontextualize my experience. Cultivate a burning desire to see and know the truth that recontextualizes your grief and bereavement in such a way as to make it exquisitely meaningful and beautiful and that you wouldn't have it any other way. When that recontextualization happens you will see a deeper, wordless truth. Before the recontextualization, the person you have lost is absent, they're gone but in this new, deeper understanding, you can see that they're not gone, they're present to you in the form of their absence and your love is viscerally present in the form of grief. It's really about seeing and feeling, not thinking it but creating it, experiencing it. Where does god play a role in this? There's no god in that sense. There's no person who decided to take your loved one away from you, there's no god who said ‘okay I'm gonna give you the opportunity to awaken through grief, I'm going to take your child away’. That's not how it works and that sort of god just doesn't exist, that's the near enemy really. When our heart has been broken there's always the possibility that we find a way to let it be broken open to infinite love and compassion that would never have been available unless that one person came into our lives and then left. I want to be clear, it's never going to conceptually make sense but it can viscerally, emotionally make sense and the presence now in the form of absence of the one you've lost can cease to be a source of suffering and become a source of love and beauty forever. So that's worth praying for, yes, absolutely. 

Student: Do you need your samskāras to get triggered to enable them to be perceived and then let go of them?

Hareesh: Usually yes. That's the easiest way. Samskāras get triggered or activated and  you can then see them and understand that you are holding on to something. Don’t cue yourself to let it go as what often happens is that we push it away in and down back into ourselves. Just cue yourself to stop holding on, stop clinging, stop gripping it. You're releasing it because it hurts but you've been gripping it for a long time and when you start opening that clenched fist, that's been clenched for years, you are suddenly faced with your vulnerable feelings so you can't go too fast.  

Student: From a non-dual perspective, why is praying for what we want different from praying for a sense of nonduality?

Hareesh: It's not. If praying for a sense of nonduality is praying for an experience, it's just another version of the same thing of  ‘give me what I want’. This is the usual human strategy to try to manipulate or control experience in such a way that you get what you want to make yourself happier more of the time. For example, if you want the non-dual experience to make you happier. 

There's another possibility here, which is this innate longing to know the truth, whatever the experience. That is not grasping or craving an experience and it's not trying to manipulate or control experience to be more pleasurable or more exalted. It is the authentic longing for the truth, whether you like it or not. You want to know the truth and be the truth, at any cost. You don't want to know the truth to make you feel good because if you want to know the truth so it'll make you feel good then you don't want to know the truth, you just think you do! Praying for that is different because you're not trying to manipulate your experience into some form that you think is going to be better.

Student: I realized that once I stopped asking ‘give me this, give me that’, I realized that   being prayerful has become more of a quality of being. It almost feels like it exists all the time and is more of an offering. 

Hareesh: Prayer can be a name for that which brings us to our knees in humility, in openness, in vulnerability and that is a beautiful and necessary element on the spiritual path. In fact, I would say give thanks to anything, anyone, or any life experience that brings you to your knees in front of your altar. Give thanks for any experience that devastates you because it can devastate you into your true nature. The heart can be broken open into the infinite, so being brought to your knees in desperation can be a great spiritual experience and a golden opportunity because when you're desperate and helpless then you're ready to let go on a deeper level. When you realize that you don't know how to do this, you don't know how to realize essence nature, you don't know how to get enlightened, you don't even know how to make a thought or work your body, that true humility can open you to your infinite nature but only if you go all the way as 99 percent doesn't work. 

Student: So you're not ever surrendering to someone or something? 

Hareesh: Correct! You're not even surrendering to the universe because if you're thinking of it that way universe is still a separate thing. There's no separate thing to surrender to so don't even surrender to the universe. What surrender means is to melt away without remainder. All trace of resistance, all struggle, all belief that you can somehow strategize your way into being in control, or being happy all the time, is gone. The poet, Daniel Ledinsky says, ‘the only difference between you and me my dear is that I know I'm checkmated and you still think you have a thousand clever moves left’. That's the only difference so you melt away that resistance without remainder and then there's no problem anymore, there never could be a problem. Then your experience becomes like the other line from the same poet Daniel Ledinsky when he says god and I are like two fat jolly men in a small boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing. But don't take this too literally because although everything you bump into is god and makes you chuckle it's a painful process for most people to completely dissolve that resistance. Many suddenly realize that what they thought was the spiritual path, what was going to be the ultimate strategy that could be leveraged to total mastery and make them happy all the time and make others happy was not true. What's true is that the spiritual path is about becoming disarmed of all your strategies, becoming truly defenceless, infinitely open, humbled to the point of not only being stripped naked but even of having your skin flayed off until you're so raw, open, and vulnerable. Then going even beyond that so that there's no more separate self anymore. It doesn't have to be painful,  don't project that it has to be, it just often is.

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Near Enemy #15: All paths lead to the same goal

What are ‘near enemies to the truth’?  Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.

Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I'm going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don't see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the first blog post in this series.  

Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that introduction, let’s turn to this month’s Near Enemy.

NEAR ENEMY #15: “All paths lead to the same goal”

There’s a form of seemingly benign wishful thinking expressed in the cliché common in alternative spiritual communities that ‘all paths lead to the same goal,’ an idea often strongly linked to the absurd yet popular notion that ‘all religions are fundamentally talking about the same thing’. One can only believe the latter statement through an extreme version of the logical fallacy called cherry-picking. What all religions have in common are three features that are unpopular, to say the least, in today’s dominant cultural mode of secular humanism: 1) they lay claim to a comprehensive domain, encompassing the totality of human life from the cradle to the grave; 2) they tell humans how to interact with superhuman beings (God or gods or spirits);[1] and 3) each religion claims to be both necessary and sufficient, meaning each one declares itself indispensable in some way and says that you need not (and should not) look to other religions, for everything you need to know is provided by that religion. Point 3) is often stated in even stronger terms, such as when a given religion explicitly claims to offer a salvation that surpasses that of all other religions. Speaking as a scholar of comparative religion, I would say that these three features are all that the religions of the world share in common. Needless to say, this is not really what people want to hear.[2]

We don’t find the idea that ‘all paths lead to the same goal’ in any premodern spiritual or religious tradition.[3] It’s very much a modern idea that gained ground in post-WWII pluralistic societies in which there was social pressure to cultivate tolerance for each other’s beliefs. Most pluralistic societies, which includes virtually all the nations of the modern West, have developed an implicit philosophy that scholars call ‘relativism’. This is more or less the idea that everyone’s point of view is equally valid: everyone has their own inviolate truth, so everyone is entitled to their opinion. It follows, on this view, that everyone’s spiritual path is equally valid. But this could only logically be the case if all paths ultimately lead to the same goal.

The problem is that relativism is totally incoherent as a philosophy. Though it sounds like a nice idea, it simply can’t be the case that incompatible points of view are equally valid. Though people are free to think what they like, we can’t say that everyone is equally entitled to their opinion in the public square of discourse, because there simply are better reasons to hold some opinions over others.

Of course, though it’s the case that many people profess a version of relativism, it’s often a form of lip service. Few people literally believe that everyone’s opinion or view is equally valid. For example, nobody reading this book thinks that the views of neo-nazis are just as valid politically, socially, or culturally as the views of others. That’s an extreme example to make a point, but even when views are more proximate to each other, when the chips are down people most people don’t really think that everyone’s point of view is equally valid, and those who profess otherwise are usually just conflict-avoidant.  

We do need to foster tolerance, but not at the expense of truth. Some views have better evidence supporting them, are more carefully thought through and more defensible than others. When you examine it, the philosophy of relativism always falls apart, and it’s also a view that tends to cause harm in unexpected ways. Consider this: the only way all points of view can be equally valid is if they’re all wrong. And the only way that is possible is if there is no such thing as truth. In this way, relativism always masks a hidden nihilism. And this nihilism is corrupting: it rots the deepest part of our collective psyche until we finds ourselves in a bleak, mediocre misery of meaninglessness. As a society, we have lost faith that notions of meaning in human life could be anything but fabricated. Nietzsche thought that we could each make our own meaning and that would work for us, but the loss of mechanisms of collective meaning-making has been debilitating for us as a species, fragmenting us into ideological tribalism and contributing to depression and hopelessness on an unprecedented scale.

Relativism entails the notion that all spiritual paths ultimately lead to the same goal. This is again an attempt at tolerance. It suggests we shouldn’t judge religions comparatively, that they’re all fundamentally equal and they’re all after the same thing. When you zoom way out, there certainly seems to be a lot of commonality amongst the goals articulated by the various religions and spiritual traditions. But this is an illusion created by the tendency of different religions to use similar terminology, when in fact these central terms of discourse are used in distinctly different ways by each tradition. As soon as you zoom in and get into the details, it becomes apparent that religions and spiritual paths are articulating different goals, since the goal of each is intimately interrelated with its distinct worldview. For most people, this then begs the question “is one more right, more correct, more real than the other?” I do think that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, “What do I want out of the spiritual path? Where do I want to end up?” Try to articulate that as clearly as you can and then see if the path you’re on describes a goal that matches your aspiration. <SNIP>

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have in mind here anthropologist Melford Spiro’s famous definition of religion, which has never yet been surpassed in terms of its ability to cover nearly all the behaviors people call ‘religious’: “A religion is an institution consisting of culturally patterned interactions with culturally postulated superhuman being(s).” (Spiro, 1966)

[2] What people want to hear is that all religions teach us to be kind to each other. Certainly it’s the case that in every scripturally-based religion (which does not cover all religions), we can find injunctions to be kind, but it’s not the case that those injunctions are equally important in all religions, and kindness is thought to be necessary for salvation or liberation in surprisingly few of them. (It’s a debatable point, but perhaps only one religion, Jainism, thinks kindness is actually necessary for achieving the primary goal of the religion.)

[3] Many adherents of Hinduism think otherwise; but in fact there are many Sanskrit texts whose whole purpose is to distinguish the various goals that different Hindu philosophies and sects advocate for: such as, for example, the 8th-century Para-mokṣa-nirāsa-kārikā, which presents (and argues against) twenty different conceptions of the liberated state (mokṣa).

 ~ ~ ~

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (transcript of a live teaching session)

Student: What are the goals of nondual Śaiva Tantra?

Hareesh: Three or two depending on how you're looking at it! The subordinate goal of nondual Shiva tantra is bhoga, meaning the ability to truly enjoy life. That's actually relatively rare and it's not just a function of privilege because plenty of people, with lots of wealth and privilege, are desperately unhappy. Bhoga doesn't have anything to do, directly, with the ability to make money or attract lovers. Bhoga means a true, deep, embodied enjoyment of life that comes from freeing yourself from your own pettiness and your own confused mental states, so it's an effective spiritual practice for some. So bhoga is related to liberation because you cannot have bhoga if you don't aim at liberation. It's even possible to pursue a tantric practice, for example, with the only goal of enjoying life more but it's going to turn out that if you really want to enjoy life more, in a deep way, that you're going to have to do some work on yourself. You're going to have to release your delusion and release your pettiness to some extent. So the goal in that sense is similar to that articulated by other yogic traditions as well except that they don't include bhoga. Classical yoga, for example, doesn’t include the enjoyment of life as a legitimate goal whereas tantra does. 

The subordinate goal supervening that goal is Moksha, liberation defined as the end of all self-limitation, the end of the separate self, the death of separate self, the end of all mind-created suffering, concomitant with awakening to your true nature.

Student: What is the difference between liberation and awakening?

Hareesh: That's an important question for virtually all the authorities in the non-dual tantric tradition. Liberation and awakening are two sides of one coin, they're two aspects of one goal: being fully awake to your true nature liberates you from suffering, liberates you from the separate self, from the ego identity. In the process before you reach the culmination where there's no more awakeness there's a nice positive feedback loop phenomenon between the two aspects of awakening and liberation. The more you wake up to your true nature, the easier it is to shed self-images, become free of forms of mind-created suffering, and see through your stories. The more you shed your stories and self-images, the easier it is to wake up to your true nature.

There is value in making an argument about a subtle distinction between the two.   One could say that liberation is not complete until you have integrated your awakening into every aspect of your life. As humans, we're pretty good at compartmentalizing and siloing. You could be very awake and partially liberated but when it comes to certain types of relationships, like romantic relationships or your relationship with your spouse, you might look significantly less than liberated to those observing your behaviour. It doesn't mean that you're not awake, it just might be evidence of the fact that the awakening is not integrated into that aspect of your life yet.

I'm one of those people that wants to argue for this subtle distinction that liberation is not complete unless awakening is integrated into all aspects of your life. It might seem like liberation is complete when you're no longer suffering but are you still causing other beings to suffer inadvertently. Then we would say your liberation is not complete. Certainly, some ancient authorities would not agree with that notion.

Student: is tantra interested in getting out of samsara?

Hareesh: Yes, but they redefined samsara as the cycle of suffering. There wasn't much stress on the idea of escaping the cycle of birth and death.

Student: I started to realize that I'm spending a lot of time studying tantra, and that self-realization is powerful, but how far can I go sitting in alone in my house?

Hareesh: All the way! You're not limited by your location, or your time in history, or your family situation, or your stories about yourself. None of those are actual limitations, just in your mind that they are. If you believe those thoughts they become limitations but they're not. 

Student:  If you have a goal, wouldn't that be ego driven and not the pure motive? 

Hareesh: No, but this is a really important point! Having a goal can be a pure motive and pure aspiration. The goal of longing to awaken can be totally free of ego. An escapist longing is not considered pure aspiration in the tradition but if it's longing to free yourself from your shackles, so that you may set others free, that's an example of a of a pure aspiration for liberation.

Student: We spoke a lot today about having goals and we used a lot of words: liberation and awakening, but as far as I understand, when you speak about Shakti there's nothing to escape from! Correct me, because you know better, but there's nothing that we escape from.

Hareesh: Exactly, that's why there is this shift in the meaning of the word samsara. Before it meant the cycle of birth and death, and then later, in tantra, it comes to mean the cycle of suffering. We are seeking to escape the cycle of suffering caused by wanting things to be different from how they are, the suffering caused by wrongly understanding the nature of the self, and the suffering caused by passing on karmas and traumas to others that we have experienced. So, we seek to stop suffering and to stop making others suffer, that is the samsara we wish to escape from in this path. There's no need to escape from existence or non-existence, those are just different manifestations of the goddess. All energy is the goddess, and all matter is energy, so all matter is the goddess too, even trauma. Energy likes to flow but stagnant, stuck energy tends to cause suffering. Suffering, ultimately, is not inherently bad or wrong but in this particular game, we're seeking to become free of it so we can benefit and uplift others. So the problem is not with the trauma, or the pain itself, the problem is when we identify with it, get stuck in it, or it gets stuck in us. Stuck energy tends to stagnate and create suffering (it doesn't have to but it tends to) and so, even though it's all energy, there's still something to do. It's all Shakti but there's still something that life calls us to which is helping to get that stuck energy to flow again for the benefit of all beings.

Student: Is there any way one could know if they, or someone else, is fully liberated such that they're not causing suffering to others? 

Hareesh: Only some lineages and traditions talk about the cessation of causing any form of harm as intrinsic to the goal of liberation. The fact remains that you can never tell whether somebody else is fully awake or fully liberated. There's no way to tell that for sure and indeed it seems to me that the whole game was set up that way on purpose (not that it was set up by somebody, I used the phrase metaphorically) but it seems very significant to me that it's not an accident. You can't ever tell for sure about someone else but the tradition declares you can tell for sure about yourself. You can reach a point where you have no doubt whatsoever that what there was to do, is now done, what there was to shed or dissolve is now dissolved, that you are awake and aware and free. It's not that there's not more to see, it's that you have realized what you are, in a very fundamental way and permanent way. You haven't just glimpsed it (because if you glimpse something you can lose that glimpse again) but any real seeing of what is, cannot be unseen. So if you actually realize your true nature, as opposed to just glimpse it, you can't lose that again. 

Please take some practical tips from this webinar, clarify your aspiration, get specific and clear about your goal with all the spiritual seeking, spiritual practice, spiritual contemplation. Clear, not vague, not ambiguous. Clear, precise, specific. Clarify your aspiration. Make sure you have an alignment of view, practice, and fruit. If the goal to which you aspire is specifically described by a specific spiritual tradition, and you're doing the practices of that tradition, and you love the philosophy of that tradition, you already have alignment. That's the reason to follow a tradition because it has a prefab alignment already set up for you. It doesn't work though if you don't resonate with the view and the articulation of the goal in that tradition. The whole reason for there being tradition is because they provide alignment of view, practice, and fruit. If you're doing this on your own, and you can do it on your own, it's just really really really really really really really hard, but if you're doing it on your own, you've got to create the alignment of view, practice, and fruit.

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