The sadhana of the Mahavidyas leads us in a seemingly circuitous fashion to what has been the truth all along—that our fundamental nature is eternal blissful awareness in which the objects of the world and our own bodies, thoughts, and feelings appear. Through the exercises in this book, we learn to stand firmly as awareness, or the Self, the I-Am, without attributes. In this chapter, we will explore how these insights can be integrated and fully lived.
We notice that with the non-dual inquiries, standing as awareness enables us to see that in our direct experience, our sense perceptions, thoughts, memories, emotions, and even our sense of self are temporary arisings. They arise and subside in awareness, and furthermore, are never separate from awareness. We come to realize that as awareness, our true nature is knowing—we are the one that knows experience.
Our fascination with the objects arising in awareness subsides, and we turn our attention to the sense of knowing. As the sense of knowing, we find no borders where “we” end and “experience” begins. When we stand as awareness, we realize that awareness knows all arisings as itself. We find that trees, rocks, sense perceptions, thoughts and emotions, and everything that we encounter is us. The I-Am, or awareness, is always experiencing itself in all objects that arise in it.
Shiva, as this unchanging Self, or awareness, is always in communion with Shakti in all the forms she takes. We learn to stand as Shiva, seeing that we are also Shakti—as the world we perceive through our senses, the sensations that make up our bodies, and our I-self with its shadows and light.
The path of the Mahavidyas draws from the elements of traditional paths such as yoga, Vedanta, and tantra, centering on devotion that then leads to single-pointedness, austerity, surrender, examination of experience and language, and opening to bliss.
Devotion can be triggered by curiosity and wonder, arising from contemplations upon the fierce and unconventional imagery of the deities. Once stoked, the flames of devotion are fanned by our ongoing practices and contemplations. It becomes the fuel for our desire for truth.
Even though devotion may have begun as an emotional attachment to an image or a form of the Divine, it eventually turns into love for the formless Self. Sundari’s loving glance catalyzes an inner transformation of desire.
Devotion on the Direct Path arises as love for awareness. It propels our inquiry and ability to take a stand as awareness. In daily life, devotion is actualized as a loss of interest in the I-self’s stories and a shift in attention to how the world and our body-mind appear in awareness.
When we become consumed by the fire of devotion, Kali and Bhuvaneshwari manifest as opportunities for learning and growth, bringing forth teachers and teachings at the right time and place in our life. Our life circumstances can evolve and change rapidly through Bhairavi’s grace. Through her light of concentration and perseverance, she converts the energy of devotion into sadhana. Single-pointedness not only helps on the path of liberation but also contributes to effectiveness in everything we undertake.
Single-pointedness on the Direct Path aids the cultivation of subtle discernment, where we learn to distinguish between awareness and the objects that arise in it. Discernment aids the “thinning” of the witness, where we stop assigning attributes to it. We come to see that every property we assign to witnessing awareness is an arising within it. In daily life, this manifests as increasing freedom from suffering.
Bhairavi’s grace gives us a new understanding of austerity—it is not a state of forced deprivation or renunciation of material things. On the path of the Mahavidyas, we renounce identification with the I-self that leads to a sense of lack. We come to realize that we cannot renounce sense objects as long as we are identified as the I-self.
On the Direct Path, austerity is the natural result of standing as awareness, where we covet nothing—all objects are known to be made of the stuff of awareness. We can now be surrounded by sense objects and remain austere without grasping or clinging.
Austerity is made possible through surrender. In Bhuvaneshwari’s sense of space and fueled by Sundari’s sweetness of devotion, we readily give up our learned concepts and beliefs in favor of the truth. Chinnamasta’s light of chastity enables us to overcome the addiction to the I-self and to stand in our true nature. At every point in our sadhana, we begin where we are, using our currently arising experience for inquiry and contemplation.
On the Direct Path, we surrender our concepts and beliefs in favor of direct experience. No part of our experience is pushed away, and instead, we learn to welcome our joy and pain into the loving arms of awareness. In daily life, surrender opens the heart, and we become increasingly generous and loving in the recognition of nonseparation between awareness and arisings.
The beauty of the tantric path is that we neither shy away from experience nor get carried away by it. We begin to recognize that all experiences are limited as they arise and pass within awareness. Within Dhumavati’s void of Self-reflection, we learn that the greatest experience of ecstasy is no different from the most profound one of pain. It welcomes both equally.
On the Direct Path, experience is the nidus for inquiry. We test ourselves with various experiences, weeding out those that keep us bound to suffering. Daily life becomes our sadhana.
Driven by a yearning for truth, we come to Bagalamukhi, whose stunning blow of silence eliminates attachment to the clutter of our conditioning and brings us to the state of purity. Matangi then shows us the binding power of language, which refers to objects with absolute certainty.
On the Direct Path, we stand as awareness to find that language itself is an arising, and like all other arisings, it points to itself. This realization frees us from taking language to be concrete, as pointing to the absolute truth—it opens us to joyful irony, where we are free to explore life without creating karma.
Free from the trappings of language and knowledge, we are finally granted the vision of Kamalatmika’s delight in beauty and bliss. We began on the path with the intent of recognizing Shiva amidst Shakti’s hypnotic manifestations. Kamalatmika’s sadhana unites them in the ecstatic bliss of recognizing that they were never separate. All of Shakti’s manifestations become delightful as we learn to cherish her in the beautiful, the virtuous, the pure—and the wicked, the depraved, and the impure.
On the Direct Path, bliss is the result of freedom from suffering. It begins to permeate our daily life as an unshakable sense of contentment and sweetness that persists no matter what happens.
Although the practices described in this book are based primarily on meditative non-dual self-inquiry, the Mahavidyas can be invoked and worshiped in many other ways. Traditionally, this path involves the use of breath, sacred sounds or mantras, and sacred symbols known as yantras. As with the techniques described in this book, the traditional tantric techniques also aid in the transformation of our shadows into light and enable the cultivation of yamas and niyamas, ethics and virtues.
Normally, we think of ethics as externally enforced values, rules, and regulations. When enforced upon us, these values become constricting and limiting, and we may rebel against them. We may also be attracted to spiritual paths that don’t emphasize the cultivation of such ethical values. But the path of the Mahavidyas shows us that the yamas and niyamas are important not only for realizing our true nature but also for living harmoniously after such insight.
In the Yoga Sutras, yamas and niyamas form the foundations for the eight-fold path of yoga. In many schools of yoga, students spend years cultivating these values before they can move on. In Vedanta and some other non-dual paths, cultivation of ethical values is encouraged through the practice of bhakti and karma yoga.
In each instance, the emphasis on cultivation of these values is to foster a heart-centered approach rather than a purely intellectual or mind-based perspective. As we have seen throughout this book, our shadow qualities are those that keep us tied to the I-self. When our entire life revolves around the I-self, our sense of separation is propagated through our thoughts and actions.
Cultivating nonviolence, truth, and other ethical qualities opens us beyond our narrow, constricted views that revolve around the I-self. When we split our heart open to kindness, compassion, and attention to our behavior with others, these values prepare us for the insights of non-dual realization. Stepping out of egocentric living is immensely freeing even without non-dual realization. By living in harmony with others and ourselves, we open to a transformation in areas where we have been struggling:
If we have the good fortune of interacting with wise and skilled teachers who have both a strong, compassionate, ethical foundation as well as non-dual insight, we notice that they seem to know what is best for everyone involved, from a universal perspective that is unconditionally loving and impartial. Although it is tempting to assign their abilities to non-dual insight alone, this is usually not the case. Opening to our true nature doesn’t necessarily make us more loving, compassionate, polite, or caring of others. This is because of our prarabdha karma.
As we saw in chapter 12, prarabdha karma is the consequence of our past actions that we must live through. It is what makes us become “set in our ways,” and continues even after self-realization. If we haven’t learned the skills of living in harmony with others, we can unintentionally and unnecessarily continue to cause harm through our words and actions. Our internal state of freedom can remain separate and dissonant from our external behavior.
This is why self-realization is not a static state or the end of the journey. Awakening is a process that continues to deepen and stabilize over months, years, and decades, giving us the opportunity to continue to hone our insight. In every moment and every experience, we have a choice to become more nonviolent and more truthful, cling less to our habitual patterns, surrender more to the Divine, remain vigilant and persevere on this journey, remain cognizant of our true nature of wholeness, remain free from the bonds of language, and open to the bliss of the here and now. Non-dual insight combined with the cultivation of these values catapults us from mundane existence to that of extraordinary beauty in our ordinary lives.
Although the Mahavidyas have been presented sequentially in this book, their grace follows no particular pattern. Shakti takes the form that is necessary for our individual predicaments, creating circumstances that aid our path of awakening.
In the sadhana of the Mahavidyas, we come to appreciate the coherence between our inner and outer worlds. Through their fierce descriptions, we come to understand the powerful creative forces within our psyche that give rise to the I-self and sustain it. As we begin to see the similarities between the macrocosm and the microcosm, we open to the vastness of creation within and without. Our sadhana evolves accordingly, becoming subtler with each insight.
We begin to see that Bhuvaneshwari refers not only to the external element of space in which physical objects appear but also to the subtle principle that seems to hold our identity together. We see her in action as the love that holds us all together in common experiences. As time, Kali refers not only to eons that have come before us, but to the sequence of events that keeps our identity intact. We look around to see Tripura Sundari’s beauty of desire that is evident in the flowers in our backyard and the puppy that lights up our life. Every time we make it to our meditation seat, we are reminded of Bhairavi’s determination to loosen our identity with the I-self; we see her flames in the sun that determinedly rises every morning. We are reminded of Chinnamasta’s power every time we experience a thunderstorm and respect it when we recognize the power of conditioning that keeps us feeling like we are separate. When we arrive at Dhumavati’s door of non-being, we learn to honor the unknown void from which everything we know arises and simultaneously begin to explore our direct experience of the void in deep sleep. Every time we become aware of the silent gap between thoughts, we pay homage to Bagalamukhi, and instead of anticipating a certain outcome in world events, we learn to appreciate her stillness in which anything can happen. When we find ourselves becoming flustered by the words others use to describe us, we laugh in remembrance of Matangi, and when we find that we are no longer attached to our path, we melt into the arms of the beautiful Kamalatmika. We find ourselves surrounded, held, and nurtured by these deities in every experience.
From the perspective of the Direct Path, inquiry leads us to the Self that transcends Sundari’s triads of manifestation. With inquiry, we come to see that we are awareness in which arisings occur. The events of the body, mind, and world are seen to be in union with awareness.
When we see everyone and everything as our own nature, there is nothing to defend. There is nobody that benefits preferentially. This does not mean that we don’t act. We continue to live in the world as before. We engage in daily activities, go to work, perform chores, travel, learn, teach, and interact with others. What is missing in this picture is the I-self and, consequently, the constant inner voice that used to evaluate, compare, judge, justify, and validate experience.
Having discovered joyful irony, we understand that language doesn’t point to absolute truth, and we experience an almost playful freedom and lack of hidden agendas in our communication with others. We know that all forms of expression point only to awareness, so we take a nonjudgmental approach when we listen to what others have to say. We are free to move through the world as we wish, and we grant others the same freedom. Through direct experience, we have come to see that Shakti in all her forms is returning to her beloved Shiva in every timeless moment.