Shiva

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September 25, 2017 Monday Night Class: When we practice contentment, we experience that which we truly are…

Abstract shiva

While a literal reading of this week’s verse from the Tao Te Ching offers a potent packet of wisdom, I find it more interesting to read with the awareness that the “country” is our own individual self and “wise governance” comes when we live from and of the Self…

Tao Te Ching
Verse 80

If a country is governed wisely,
its inhabitants will be content.
They enjoy the labor of their hands
and don’t waste time inventing
labor-saving machines.
Since they dearly love their homes,
they aren’t interested in travel.
There may be a few wagons and boats,
but these don’t go anywhere.
There may be an arsenal of weapons,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy their food,
take pleasure in being with their families,
spend weekends working in their gardens,
delight in the doings of the neighborhood.
And even though the next country is so close
that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs
barking,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.

I found this verse such a beautiful evocation of the yogic practice of contentment, aka santosha, I also brought in Edwin Bryant, Chip Hartranft and Mukunda Stiles’ versions of Patanjali-Yoga-Sutra, II:42. I didn’t have time to read EB in class but will include that here.

II, 42.

Contentment brings unsurpassed joy.   (CH)

From contentment one gains supreme happiness.   (MS)

From contentment, the highest happiness is attained.   (EB)

[santoshad anuttamaha sukha-laabhaha]

 

Here’s this week’s dharma talk which unpacks all of the above. Ordinarily I would write more but am feeling under the weather so will let my dharma talk do the talking for this post…

 

I’ll leave the final word to Mary Oliver…

 

TODAY

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. 

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance. 

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple. 

VARANASI

Early in the morning we crossed the ghat,
where fires were still smoldering,
and gazed with our Western minds, into the Ganges.
A woman was standing in the river up to her waist;
she was lifting handfuls of water and spilling it
over her body, slowly and many times,
as if until there came some moment
of inner satisfaction between her own life and the river’s.
Then she dipped a vessel she had brought with her
and carried it filled with water back across the ghat,
no doubt to refresh some shrine near where she lives,
for this is the holy city of Shiva, maker
of the world, and this is his river.
I can’t say much more, except that it all happened
in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt
like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived
in accordance with that certainty.
I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back
to America.
Pray God I remember this.

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

And close with class chanting of Om Namah Shivaya and final dharana...

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Monday, July 29, 2013: It can seem very dark down there, but ah, there is so much light…..

Shiva Dance Abstract

We continue our immersion in the shakti of Maha Mrtunjaya Mantra… I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the descriptive phrase for Shiva as “spacious as the sky…” I love this metaphor for the way it whispers our human possibility…  Spacious as the sky. We can become that. And yet to touch this interior hugeness, let alone merge into it, there’s the challenge… it’s way too big for grasp of hands and mind. We have to tiptoe into it and rest there. In the space between the breaths, in those sublime moments of pure stillness, in the profound release of an “aha.”

In those moments we are at one with Everything. As the beloved Tibetan dakini Yeshe Tsogyel says so beautifully, “Then the joy of the One will hold you like a lake…”
I was driving home the other night at sunset listening to the Maha Mrtunjaya mantra in my car. The sky was ablaze in pink, blue, and purple. As I came over the ridge, I saw the sun sitting at the edge of the horizon. The light was pure gold. The mantra was blasting. It was a moment of pure magnificence, so much deeper than joy or power or exultation. The sky, the sun, the mantra, Shiva, Devi, Light, Dark, the Everythingness of Life. I was part of it. It was all of me. And what more can I say….
This is the experience of Maha Mrtunjaya Mantra. It is the touching into what some call Unity-Awareness. The Shaivites call it Shiva. The Shaktites call it Devi. We refer to it more generically as the Inner Self. But it so doesn’t matter what we call it. It’s not listening when we try to contain it. In fact it turns the other way. It’s the inner experience blazing in every cell. That’s what it’s about. That’s why we meditate. That’s why we chant. That’s why we cultivate awareness, kindness, generosity, selflessness, sacrifice… That’s what we find in Love…
Here’s this week’s dharma talk:
Here’s mantra chanting and a dharana:

Here are the Mary Oliver poems. Scroll down to last week’s post for text of the Devara Dasimaya poems I read again this week…

THE FISH
Mary Oliver

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

HONEY AT THE TABLE
Mary Oliver

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits  of tree, crushed bees – a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.

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Monday, July 22, 2013: “Whatever It was that made this earth…to that Mystery, indifferent to differences, to it I pray…”

Shiva3

I’ve titled this post with a quote from one of the Devara Dasimayya poems I read towards the end of class. Whether we respond to form or formless, literal or metaphor, silence or the roar, underneath it all is the triadic heart of wisdom, simplicity, and love so clearly articulated in these poetic lines…

Monday Night Class continues our sojourn into the Maha Mrtunjaya mantra. Nowadays we can google a mantra and find pages of commentary and videos. Which can be a decent introduction. However, in my experience, if you want a mantra to come alive inside of you, if you want to receive the power of that mantra, chanting it over and over again is the portal…  Nothing I [or anyone] can say is as important as your own practice.

So during this cycle of classes, I’m keeping my dharma talks rather brief, focusing on the experiential process of chanting the Maha Mrtunjaya mantra:

Here’s an audio clip from the first round of chanting:

Here’s my dharma talk:

Here’s a clip of of second round of Maha Mrtunjaya moving into Om Namah Shivaya:

Here’s a lovely dharana on the Maha Mrtunjaya mantra:

And here are the four Devara Dasimayya poems I read towards the end of class. Text follows this audio clip:

87.
Whatever It was
that made this earth
the base,
the world its life,
the wind its pillar,
arranged the lotus and the moon,
and covered it all with folds
of sky
with Itself inside,
to that Mystery
indifferent to differences,
to It I pray…
 

80.
The earth is your gift,
the growing grain your gift,
the blowing wind your gift.
 
What shall I call these fools
who eat out of your hand
and praise everyone else?
 

98.
To the utterly at-one with Shiva
there’s no dawn,
no new moon,
no noonday,
nor equinoxes,
nor sunsets,
nor full moons;
his front yard
is the true Benares…

144.
Suppose you cut a tall bamboo
in two;
make the bottom piece a woman,
the headpiece a man;
rub them together
till they kindle:
                             tell me now,
the fire that’s born,
is it male or female?

Finally, just to note that this week’s class fell on Guru Purnima, the full moon of July holiday when yogis honor their guru. Tainted though it’s been by scandal and all too human clay feet, the guru principle is profound. The syllable “gu” translates as ignorance and “ru” as that which removes ignorance. So the guru is the wisdom force that obliterates the darkness of ignorance, leaving in its place, the light of the Self.

The great full moon of mid-summer is a potent mirror of that light…  and to that Mystery in all its myriad names, paths, and forms, indifferent to differences, I bow…