Kamalatmika resolves her shadow of conflict through her light of contentment, one of the niyamas of the Yoga Sutras. In the journey from the head to the heart, Kamalatmika opens us to the beauty and bliss of creation.
Her power imbues every object and forms the basis for what we know as the natural laws of creation. Her dazzling form fills the senses with delight in every interaction and experience. She melts cunningly into creation, playing eternal hide-and-seek with it and challenging it to find her. Kamalatmika, the tenth Mahavidya, symbolizes bliss.
Kamalatmika is named after the lotus, a flower that is born of the mud but remains uncontaminated by it.
Exercise: Contemplate Kamalatmika
Contemplate Kamalatmika’s radiant form. How does her beauty manifest in your life? Make a list of all the situations that appear to have none of her beauty. What kind of shift in your outlook can change so you can perceive her in them?
Kali and Kamalatmika lie at the opposite ends of the Mahavidya spectrum because they seem to represent two opposing qualities. As the unencumbered reality, Kali represents transcendence of creation—her fierce form indicates the bare truth of the Divine that lies beneath all dualities. On the other hand, Kamalatmika’s soft and gentle form represents the fully adorned beauty of the Divine in manifestation—she symbolizes the natural explosion of the Divine’s bliss into forms.
Unlike a mother giving birth to a child wherein they become separate entities connected emotionally and psychologically, Shakti births the universe and becomes it. Even though she seems to separate from her beloved Shiva, she remains in blissful union with him. The bliss of their union infuses every object in creation, from the largest star to the minutest particle. Bliss is the very fabric of creation.
Our lives are marked by the pursuit of bliss and contentment. We seek them in wealth, fame, security, love, and spiritual fulfillment. But it is this seeking itself that prevents us from accessing the bliss that is our nature. To realize this bliss, the I-self must first be decapitated by Kali, leading us to the light of the subsequent Mahavidyas. While the previous Mahavidyas symbolize the upward journey of the unleashed kundalini to transcend the limitations of both the world and our identity, Kamalatmika represents the return downward journey of transcendent Self-knowledge into the world and our body-mind.
We respond to life circumstances through a complex interplay of our neurological and hormonal systems. Our response consists of the firing of nerve cells that induce the release of chemicals that in turn influence how we think and feel about the circumstance and the action we will take. This entire response system is fueled by prana coursing through the nadis of our subtle body, which in turn is influenced by our vasanas of right and wrong, of should and should not, and of good and bad.
Through repeatedly influencing our neurohormonal system with the dualities unique to our vasanas, we condition these responses to be linear and predictable. Driven by our vasanas, we respond to situations based on past stories and future aspirations. This linearity of thought constricts the energy in our nadis, where we use only a limited number of them and lose access to the rest. Linearity of thought results in conditional beauty—we see it only in particular objects, people, and situations. We are unable to find beauty in the trash, in pain, or in disaster. Our expectations become static, where we prefer only the things we think are good, and shun what we believe are bad. Because this doesn’t happen, we become entangled in conflict with the way things are.
We can experience a deep internal conflict about what awakening is when we remain enslaved by our preference for pleasure and aversion to pain. Resplendent beauty can only be known with unconditional love and acceptance. Especially on the spiritual path, much of what we do in worship, meditation, and inquiry can easily become tools to push away suffering. This is a well-known phenomenon known as “spiritual bypassing,” in which we use spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid uncomfortable feelings, memories, and needs.30
We can try very hard to “let go” of unexamined issues, only to discover that we simply can’t let them go. This happens because when we examine an issue, or perceived limitation, with the ulterior motive of letting it go, getting beyond it, and finding freedom from it, the issue is driven deeper into the psyche through suppression or repression. Sooner or later, it is bound to surface again.
When we reject our shadows or issues, we fuel their ability to keep us bound in our limitations. Kamalatmika’s beauty is unattainable until we can see it equally in everything. And for this, we must overcome the linearity of our response system, which rests on the likes and dislikes of our vasanas.
Our energetic, hormonal, and neurological systems indicate our internal needs, such as hunger, fatigue, and sexual arousal, and serve to identify external stimuli, such as food, environment, or interactions in relationships. Instead of viewing experience through the lens of our vasanas, tantra teaches us to open to experience as a dynamic, moment-to-moment process. If we can refrain from labeling internal or external stimuli as “good” or “bad,” we can experience our energetic, hormonal, and neurological responses in their entirety.
Opening to pure, unconditioned experience opens the flow of energy through previously contracted nadis, giving us access to fresh neural pathways in the brain and releasing new chemicals from the hormonal glands. Without the contracting power of conditioning our experience, our energy is freed up to rise in the sushumna. We stop creating more vasanas and become increasingly free of karmic bonds and open to the dazzling beauty of creation.
There are some extreme practices in tantra that are designed to enable us to overcome our linear responses to stimuli that cause particularly strong conditioned responses. Five of these stimuli are known as the panchamakaras, which include consumption of wine, meat, fish, and various types of grains, and practicing ritual sex. These stimuli tend to be strongly embedded in our psyche through social and moral conditioning. Although most paths advocate strictly avoiding these stimuli, they are used in very precise ways in tantra under the close supervision of a teacher. These stimuli are prescribed for a practitioner based on his or her gunas and stage of development.31
We don’t have to resort to the extreme tantric practices to facilitate the opening of nadis. In fact, most of us will never be called to them because of the rigor and guidance needed for the practice. Instead, we can challenge ourselves by opening to our dislikes and aversions. For example, if you dislike a particular food, you may use it as a stimulus by making a ritual of it. Prepare or buy it, engaging all of your senses in the process—how does it look, feel, smell, and taste? Savor each sensation, focusing entirely on your energetic-neurologic-hormonal response and not on the stories of dislike—what happens to your heartbeat and breath pattern? How do the muscles respond?
When we can break through our linear thought patterns by savoring our minor dislikes, we can move on to the major ones. Can you apply the same process to a situation or person that you intensely dislike? Being a vira takes immense courage to open to the things we fear or abhor, which facilitates the realization of Kamalatmika’s light of contentment.
In the Yoga Sutras, contentment is one of the niyamas—it is the result of seeing through the I-self’s sense of lack.
Kamalatmika’s grace bestows beauty into a mesmerizing sunset, a haunting melody, the exquisite touch of the beloved, the juiciness of the perfectly ripe fruit, and the lingering fragrance of the rose bloom. Without her allure, no sense object would hold our interest. While the beauty of some objects seems obvious, her grace results in opening to the inherent beauty of consciousness beyond the superficial appearance of objects. When our perception is polished through sadhana, even situations, people, and objects that were previously unacceptable are embraced and begin to appear beautiful. No circumstance or action is seen to be gross, dirty, or immoral. Her exquisite beauty is seen in all manifestations as equally valid. It is through Kamalatmika’s grace that even Dhumavati’s apparent ugliness becomes beautiful.
Awareness does not evaluate what to let through. Filtering of experience is done by the I-self when it labels arisings as acceptable or not based on past learning—our ordinary linear way of responding. If something is arising, it is because awareness welcomes it—despite the mind’s labeling of it as right or wrong. The mind’s evaluations have no bearing on awareness because the mind is itself arising in it. Just as the sun doesn’t care whether the flowers approve of the weeds, it makes no difference to awareness that the I-self prefers one thing over another. Just as flowers and weeds are equally nourished by the sun, all phenomena are welcomed in awareness.
When we stand as awareness, we overcome linearity of response and allow everything to arise without the I-self’s filter. In this act of allowing everything to arise and simply be, the exquisite beauty of the arising is deeply felt and seen. This tantric sadhana is one that opens the doors to unimaginable sensuality and radiance. Inquiry now becomes a tool of curious and loving self-discovery. When the intent of inquiry thus shifts, the separation between Shiva as awareness and Shakti as arisings collapses to reveal their eternal union.
Kamalatmika’s beauty does not lie in the external form of the object or situation as much as it does in the life-force that fuels the seeing itself. Thus, when anger, jealousy, or anxiety arises, we can allow it to be instead of preferring another thing in its place. When the energy of the discomfort is allowed to arise and be fully felt, it reveals the bliss that underlies all emotions. This allowing is an act of love. Without unconditional love for our own follies, the world will always remain separate and be a source of suffering. Self-judgment must be allowed to arise and be loved before we can see our judgments of the world.
Contentment arises when we realize that we have never been lacking, and that the shadow and the light belong in us equally. When we let our shadows in, we become whole. Wholeness pours out as beauty and bliss, saturating every internal and external experience. Allowing opens us to non-linearity of response, which in turn leads to realizing that what we had considered our identity thus far is just a temporary arising in awareness. Non-linearity of response is the end of karma.
Thus far, we have looked at karma as the sum total of all of our past actions that determine our future outcomes. In Kamalatmika’s sadhana, we come to see that the concept of karma applies only to the I-self. In chapter 3, we examined the theory of reincarnation, in which we continue to go through cycles of life and death as long as we remain identified as a limited being. However, we need not think of reincarnation as being born again and again over hundreds or thousands of years. The I-self is birthed again and again by our vasana-laden desires, which in turn arise from its inherent sense of lack and give rise to ongoing karma. Karma can be understood better when broken down into its various forms.
Sanchita karma is the sum total of all our past actions, going back to the origin of the I-self. Sanchita karma is like your entire karmic bank balance and refers to all the actions you ever took as the I-self. The only way to get rid of this balance is to spend it. As we’ve seen in chapter 3, desire is the lifeblood of the I-self, and thus, one way to diminish our karmic balance is to fulfill our desires. However, this is not as easy as it seems because in the process of spending, we accumulate more karma.
According to the reincarnation theory, we choose a certain portion of the sanchita karma to live out in our next life. If we’ve lived through thousands of lives, we’ve accumulated so many desires that it is difficult to fulfill all of them in one lifetime. For example, you may have a burning desire to be a world-class pianist and a famous astronaut. Chances are that you’ll have to pick different lifetimes to fulfill both desires. Prarabdha karma refers to the amount of past karma we withdraw from our entire bank balance to live out during a particular lifetime.
When we apply this to the rebirth of the I-self, we see that at any given point in time, we are choosing to act on one of our many desires. For example, you may want both a successful career and a meaningful family life, and if you can’t achieve both of your desires simultaneously, you may take a temporary break from work or take a less demanding position to raise your family.
Whether we apply this to reincarnation or to the I-self, we don’t just spend the previously withdrawn money. If you chose to be a pianist in this lifetime, your life experiences will lead you to want entirely new things that were not previously in your bank account. You might pick up an interest in cooking and develop an intense desire to become a well-known chef. If you can’t fulfill this desire in this lifetime, it goes into your account.
Similarly, if you took a break from your career to raise your family, you might develop an interest in school administration and wish to make a difference. If you can’t give up your attachment to your career entirely, the new desire is added to the balance to be fulfilled later. The new desires we accumulate are known as agami karma.
We cultivate brand-new desires while fulfilling previously accumulated ones, which are added to our karmic balance that grows with each lifetime. And so, we take birth after birth to try to fulfill them all.
When we apply this to the I-self, we see that its desires multiply throughout our lives, keeping us bound in repeated cycles of duality, such as pleasure and pain. The cycles of duality are known as samsara—with each cycle, we create more vasanas when we respond to life in fixed and linear ways. The shadows of all the Mahavidyas keep us entrenched in samsara.
The sadhana of the Mahavidyas ends this perpetual cycle. By opening to the light and wisdom of each of the previous nine goddesses, we arrive at Kamalatmika’s door of contentment. Washed by the light of the previous Mahavidyas, we stop creating further vasanas. There is no further karma added to our account, which marks the end of agami karma. We see through the I-self, which is built upon karma, and this realization brings an end to sanchita karma—our entire balance is permanently erased.
However, there is no escaping the consequences of prarabdha karma. Because we have already withdrawn a certain amount from the karmic balance, we have to spend it without accumulating more of it. The actions we have performed throughout this lifetime will continue to yield their fruit until the body dies. We will have no choice in this matter and must live through it. This is why even great self-realized sages are afflicted with cancer or heart disease—they are “living out” the consequences of prarabdha karma. Kamalatmika’s light of contentment shows us how to live out these consequences, which is by embracing the I-self.
Thus far in the sadhana of the Mahavidyas, we have seen the deleterious effects of identifying as the I-self, or the ego. Every technique that we have learned so far has been focused on loosening identification with the I-self and realizing our identity as the witnessing awareness in which the I-self occurs. But this is not the full story.
When our identity shifts from the I-self to awareness, we can continue to experience a subtle duality, in which there is continued separation between the two. When witnessing awareness becomes the “I,” our identity, the I-self might now begin to be experienced as “not I.” There is continued separation, where we stand apart from the I-self and where it appears as the “other.” In this situation, although our suffering has come to an end from seeing that we are not the I-self, we are still unable to open to Kamalatmika’s beauty.
Her grace enables us to unite the two—like everything, the I-self is also an arising in awareness. It arises, stays a while, and subsides back into awareness. It is thus “made of” awareness. We come to realize that awareness is the knowing principle—when we look deeply at our direct experience, we see that it doesn’t make sense to say that awareness knows of an arising when the arising is made of its own nature. The ocean knows the wave as itself.
Similarly, we come to see that all arisings, in reality, are “I.” When we say we know something, we acknowledge that knowing can only know itself. In this realization, the I-self is seen to be not separate from the “I.” Although it might feel like we have come full circle, our vantage point is different. We can continue to live our lives the way we did before and refer to ourselves with our names, but we are no longer bound by the limitations of the I-self. We can continue with our self-improvement projects, learn new skills, travel the world, have a family, and acquire possessions. The difference is that with this new view, all of these activities arise from the fullness of contentment instead of the lack that is characteristic of the I-self.
The I-self is not given any more importance than any other arising. All arisings can arise as they do without the slightest effort to manipulate them. This allowing has the flavor of love and openheartedness because we now know that no arising can diminish our nature or take away from it. The bliss of this contentment pours over all arisings, including the I-self. This is radical self-love, where every arising is seen to be the “I”—we love because love is who we really are.
Exercise: Moving from Shadow to Light—Allowing Beauty to Surface
There are two parts to this practice. One is a sitting-down meditation practice, while the other is an open-eyed practice that is done while going about your day. You may want to journal about your experience for later review.
Sitting-Down Practice: Understanding Response to Stimuli
Open-Eyed Practice
“Joyful irony” is a term coined by Greg Goode that describes the realization of the Self on the Direct Path. It refers to freedom from suffering, conceptual thought, mind, language, and eventually, the spiritual path itself.32 The path of the Mahavidyas begins with Kali’s decapitating blow and ends with Kamalatmika’s heart-opening grace, where harsh resistance to the totality of life is transformed into radiating joy. The irony refers to being free from concepts and language, where they are no longer taken to be real or true (as we saw in chapter 10). It is the result of deep inquiry into the body, the objects of the world, the mind, and subtle states such as deep sleep. Joyful irony represents the culmination of the inquiry with the collapse of the witness.
Recall that the non-dual exercises in the previous chapters required us to take the stand of witnessing awareness. When we begin the practice of inquiry, the witness can seem to have mindlike characteristics. When we stand as the witness, we may strongly feel that we are neither the body nor the mind, but we may expect witnessing to change our life experience or the quality of the arisings. We can feel that unpleasant arisings should not be allowed by witnessing awareness, or wonder why things unfold as they do. We can question the metaphysical properties of the arisings, such as their relationship with time and space. We can even feel as if witnessing awareness has the attribute of memory, where it manages arisings based on previous ones.
As we progress along the Direct Path, the witness loses these attributes and becomes increasingly transparent. When we start investigating the I-self, memory, desire, time, and causality, we come to see that they are all arisings in witnessing awareness. On the path of the Mahavidyas, macrocosmic and microcosmic symbolisms of the deities begin to dissolve in the growing clarity of awareness with deep inquiry. Thus, we begin to see that the very path that led us to clarity and understanding is merely an arising. When we stand as awareness, there is nothing that we can cling to. Our most cherished beliefs and paths dissolve quietly into awareness.
The natural progression along the Direct Path is that the witness becomes increasingly more transparent, where no arising is seen to be more or less profound than another, leading to unconditional love. Awareness, our true nature, never resists or rejects any arising. All arisings are welcomed equally without moral, social, or ethical conditioning. Eventually, the subtle separation that remains between awareness (subject) and arising (object) collapses. Arisings no longer seem like they are separate from awareness. We see that we are awareness and the arisings. We arrive home to see we had never left.
“Irony” here refers to seeing how we have looked for home when we have never left it. “Joyful” refers to the openhearted sense of being entirely at peace with what is, knowing that who we are can never be diminished by our life circumstances, our past stories, or our shadows. In the short journey from the head to the heart, Kamalatmika opens us to the beauty of joyful irony.
When we come to see through Matangi’s light that language no longer seems to refer to any arising as objective truth, the experience is of delight. We still use language, go about our daily lives, and pursue hobbies and spiritual practices, but they no longer bind us. While these pursuits previously arose from a sense of lack, they now arise as an overflow of contentment, Kamalatmika’s light.
No specific practice is required for the witness to become transparent or for its eventual collapse. Continued inquiry into body sensations, perceptions of the world, thoughts, the mind, and states will suffice.
On the path of the Mahavidyas, what began as the path of transformation of shadow to light culminates in the understanding of our true nature. Shakti, through her innumerable forms as the shadow and the light, coaxes us to meet her beloved Shiva. Through their intricate dance in the cosmos, the body, and the mind, Shiva and Shakti reveal to us that they have always been one.