A Channel Of Space & Time: Radiance Sutras Verse 21

47:59

47:59

A Channel Of Space & Time: Radiance Sutras Verse 21

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talks

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Meditation

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During this session, we discuss Verse 21 of the Yukti Verses from the 'Radiance Sutras, a translation of the Vijanana Bhairava Tantra by Lorin Loche. A meditation follows our discussion. These sessions are recorded on a weekly basis and all are welcome.

Meet your Teacher

Toronto, ON, Canada

Meet your Teacher

Toronto, ON, Canada

Transcript

So today we're reading out of the Radiant Sutras which is a beautiful book by Lauren Roche and this is a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. Vijnana means wisdom and Bhairava means going beyond duality or experiencing the oneness in duality and then tantra is actually book or teaching. So the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. How this is going to work is I will read a sutra and the idea is to sit back and close your eyes and listen with the eternal side of who we are. You know there's that part of us that's you know when we lie under the stars and we look up and as much as it can be very overwhelming maybe to think of the vastness of the universe, It's even wilder to imagine that that vastness is inside of us like right now. Every one of us, No matter what's going on in our life, No matter what players are in our life or what structures are in our life, The energy that flows through us is just like those stars, Just like the universe. So that's the part of us that we want to listen to the sutras with because that's all it's almost like that's who they were written for and then when that part of us expands it's like it just feeds all of our cells and our thoughts and our emotions and we become just a little bit more infinite or a little bit more wonderful like literally full of wonder. So if you have a book today we're gonna read Sutra or verse 21 on page 56 but you don't need to have a book but even if you have a book to just even close your eyes and let yourself listen. Even there when you say let yourself listen imagine self with a capital S like let yourself listen not your personality not who everyone thinks you are but like you. So let's close our eyes let's just breathe deeply relax your shoulders expand the belly as you inhale contracting as you exhale your back is a gateway to the sky the celestial dance the story of space and time is coded in the spine attend simultaneously to the area around your tailbone vibrating with luminous space and to the spine as a channel gushing with radiant emptiness here where particles flash in and out of existence is the origin of mind. What stands out for you? What feeling does that bring up for? What words flow through your mind when you hear that? I started crying possibilities feels true emotions rose I feel such peace and one with the stars it means you connected with your soul a sense of awe and wonder raging with the stars a sense of awe and wonder radiates crazy visuals the whole back became a gate a large vertebrae I feel the energy connecting me from earth to sky galactic connection I feel called to draw the vision I saw small particles in the air says that's me there's a few things I want to chat about and then at the end we're actually going to do a meditation to experience what they're talking about so if you imagine that we have this physical body and the physical body is earth air fire water and ether all brought together to create this interesting physical body in yoga they often talk about the koshas k-o-s-h-a which means sheath or covering and there's there's five koshas the first one is the anamaya kosha which is the physical body it actually anna means meat so so basically this word is anna which means meat maya which is this maya which is this incredible creation that we're living within this curious space where energy appears like matter this is maya this is the place we get to live and then kosha is sheath so it's anamaya kosha then we have the prana maya kosha and the prana is like the prana maya kosha prana maya kosha is like this orange peel around the orange it's not the orange it's the peel so it's the next layer or the next sheath and the prana maya kosha is where our life force where our breath flows and it is a very different energy than our body like even right now as we're sitting here you can feel the physical body like you can feel its existence then you can feel the breath going in and out of your body or the energy coming in and out of your body you can see the things that you see that are entering your eyes entering your mind this is the prana maya kosha it's kind of our interaction with the world the other three koshas are like manomaya kosha which is the mind is our brain which is kind of our mind and it's it's that processor that is separate from the prana maya kosha separate from the physical body and then the vijnana maya kosha just like this book the vijnana by rava tantra the vijnana is wisdom and the vijnana maya kosha i always see it like this safe space where we deeply understand something and we're very kind to ourselves within that space and then the ultimate one is ananda maya kosha bliss so we have bliss wisdom mind breath and body but this sutra is about the energy that flows inside of the prana maya kosha and that energy is the void the nothingness the potentiality and maybe even what we might call the plenum the plenum is a word that david boehm this wonderful quantum physicist said that what if the space around us even though we can't see anything in it what if it's actually full and all the things we see are actually empty like if you were swimming through the ocean with goggles you wouldn't see the water you would only see the bubbles so what if what we perceive as void or nothingness is actually everythingness which is weirdly enough the same thing and this is the energy of our breath this is the energy that makes up this prana maya kosha so what's really interesting is when we okay we kind of tune in with our bodies we go okay yeah i've got this body okay now focus on your spine like literally on your spine right now we can feel the physical vertebrae right you can feel those physical vertebrae you can feel the cushions in between them you can go all the way down to the base of the spine all the way down to the cossacks right down to the sit bone feel all of that awareness all the way up and down well the other thing that runs along that so if you imagine that this body is sort of energy manifest well the energy that manifests that beautiful spine is shushmana which is this energy nadi this main energy channel that the kundalini rises or prana flows in that kind of thing and we have thousands and thousands tens of thousands of nadis in the body nadi would be n a d i and this is how prana flows through our body is through these energy channels through the body so the prana doesn't just go into our lungs it actually flows to every single part of us probably all the way into our aura and everything i don't really know the main channel is this shushmana that runs from the crown of your head through all the chakras all the way down to the root chakra so what this sutra is saying that if you close your eyes and you focus on what is within that shushmana within the back within that energy channel it's nothingness shunya void and the lower region the base when they say focus on the base or the lower part what they're saying is the space between your navel point and your perineum the space between your sex organs and your anus that's the perineum if you visualize right now the space between the navel and the perineum this is a very magical space energetically and even just within your own body to tune into that space that this is the space of alchemy this is the space of prana shakti they talk about how we are here because there was oneness and if you imagine that oneness at your crown chakra and then shakti descended into the physical world down to our root chakra this is where she lies curled the kundalini shiva the energy the masculine stays at the crown but the feminine is this manifest energy this is the energy we experience between navel and the perineum so imagine you focus there for a moment and we'll do this more in the meditation but imagine you focus there between the navel and your perineum but you focus on the nothingness the emptiness it's like the starry sky but you focus on the sky and you feel it between your navel and your perineum so the idea of this sutra is if you focus on the energy of the spine or the shushmana and the energy at the base at the same time you will experience the essence of the universe you'll experience the essence of mind and you'll no longer have any of these structures in your brain at least for a while you're pondering it because you'll experience the world beyond the personality beyond the social conditioning beyond our thoughts the other interesting part of this sutra where's the perineum the perineum is you know the point right between your sexual organs and your anus there's like a flat little area there there that's the perineum and it's like literally the root that is where our true root chakra is it's literally where we're all sitting right now on the earth the other thing i want to mention here it says the last line is here where particles flash in and out of existence is the origin of mind and what i love about that is when we see the physical world in science in physics we understand they call it newtonian mechanics where sir isaac newton he said you know what here's gravity here's the notorious apple it falls at a certain velocity towards the earth and we can calculate that we can take a ball throw it on a particular trajectory and it will land exactly here we can build a bridge and it can support exactly this much weight we can calculate that this is what they call newtonian physics because isaac newton was the the king of that or the famous one anyway i'm sure there were hundreds doing it at the same time but what's interesting about and a lot of this is what we learn in school we learn that this is what physics is because this is how the physical world works but of course there's always weird things that happen that don't make any sense like for example if you've read my book tantric intimacy i tell the story of my dad and my dad when he was in his 20s he would drive tour buses in the rocky mountains in western canada and one time he was driving the bus along the edge of the mountain and in a lot of areas on those mountains there's only one way to go you either you're coming up against the mountain on the right side or the steep cliff on the left there's nowhere to go so one day he was driving along and he started to descend down the side of the mountain and he realized he had no brakes at the bottom of this road there was a turn and the turn went on to a bridge and the bridge was only one lane and of course he saw he knew he was going to go onto the bridge and then of course the other side of the bridge the road would go up again so hopefully he'd be able to control the bus or something and all he hoped was that there would be no one on that bridge because he had no brakes so he's just kind of holding on for dear life he goes down the bridge he goes down the hill turns onto the bridge and of course there's another tour bus halfway across the bridge and my dad's just but what can you do and so he's driving along or he's not driving he's just rolling at a very fast speed across this bridge and he said the last thing he saw was the other bus drivers like whites of his eyes like so terrified and then all of a sudden the buses were on the opposite side of each other and they continued on their way they didn't touch to this day my dad just cries every time he talks about it because it breaks all newtonian physics like that's not possible according to the science we learned in school and so what's interesting is then when we look into quantum physics when we understand that let's assume that we really are made of atoms maybe we're not maybe it's string theory maybe there's something else that's why string theory exists because even the atomic theory doesn't work all the time and that's why they're looking for a united theory you know that actually works for everything because they can't find anything that works for everything but right now if we if we maintain our ideas about the atomic theory that within the atoms there are neutrons and protons and electrons flying around but these are basically just energy flying charged particles flying around and they're held together by magnetism and this curious energy somehow appears like a tour bus or like my glasses but the crazy thing is and what drives quantum physicists crazy is they can't predict the motion of the electrons when they think the electron is going to go here it doesn't it might shoot that way shoot this way or disappear altogether and appear somewhere else literally these electrons just do whatever they want and so the physicists are like oh well the electron is going to go here and it's going to go here and then it just disappears altogether so there's no such thing this would be like us taking a ball throwing it and part way along it just disappears and you're like where'd the ball go like it just it's just not there that's why I love the fact that the final words in this stanza because what we're talking about is the energy that makes up the universe this is the energy in our spine this is the energy in the base this is the energy that makes up the universe and what's our final line here here where particles flash in and out of existence and they're just floating 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Well it's interesting because some of the the words in it after we do the meditation I'll read this in Sanskrit and in English again but for example the Sanskrit that says means the void in the back and then the next length the next words are and so if you've studied the chakras or anything or yoga the means the base of the spine and so they're talking about the stillness the void in the root chakra so interesting the void in the heart we did a meditation on that a few weeks ago. All right so let's do a meditation let's sit nice and tall you can sit cross-legged on the floor or on your heels you can sit on a chair just make sure your spine is tall make sure you really have a nice seat so that your spine is like sitting on a candle base that your buttocks is like a base of a candle and your spine is rising up from the center like a straight candlestick and when we breathe we want to make sure as we inhale that our belly is expanding and contracting as we exhale as we begin as we begin picture one of your vertebrae like a beautiful floating disc and envision the night sky in that disc see the stars black sky the expansiveness the sparkling twinkling stars and as you breathe really feel that circling disc of your vertebrae as this beautiful infinite galaxy and then imagine all of your vertebrae as these beautiful infinite galactic discs picture them all with this infinite energy void universal consciousness but it's not full of stuff its potentiality its nothingness and then sitting nice and tall with your hands on your knees very gently inhale as you bend to the left then exhale as you bend to the right staying aware of these vertebrae feeling the flow from one to the other of this galactic energy inhaling left exhaling right and then coming to center inhale as you press your chest forward arching your spine forward exhaling as you arch backwards inhaling forward exhaling back picturing these beautiful discs of the galaxy flexing forward and backward kind of like one of those candy bracelets or the little round candies are on the elastic band and imagine that like feeling this flow because this is us in our life we have this infinite galactic energy flowing through our spine all the time from our perineum all the way up to the crown of our head whether we're doing dishes whether we're walking down the street whether we're making love whether we're cooking dinner we always have this galactic energy flowing up and down our spine and then come to center and bring your navel around in a circle around your hip bones inhaling as you go around the front exhaling as you go around the back and again inhaling as you go around the front exhaling as you go around the back and again feeling the flow of these vertebrae feeling the energy the prana shakti flowing through these vertebrae from the perineum from the first chakra all the way up to the crown chakra feel this beautiful void void the beautiful nothingness that everything is born from be aware of the discs in the center of the spine visualize them however you'd like moving down the spine to the lower spine the lower back and now let's roll the other direction feeling your spine undulating around your hip bones moving up into the upper back between your shoulder blades even into your neck all the intricate magical vertebrae created out of this galactic energy and then let's come to center tuck your chin in just a little bit to straighten the spine at the back of the neck press your lower back forward drop your shoulders down focus your energy on the spine and the area between your navel and the perineum at the same time feel shunya the night sky infinity let's just breathe here for a minute allowing all of your attention to be on the to be on the nothingness in your spine and at the root of your spine your back is a gateway to the sky the celestial dance the story of space and time is coated in the spine attend simultaneously to the area around your tailbone vibrating with luminous space and to the spine as a channel gushing with radiant emptiness here where particles flash in and out of existence is the origin of mind i'm going to read that one more time your back is a gateway to the sky the celestial dance the story of space and time is coated in the spine attend simultaneously simultaneously to the area around your tailbone vibrating with luminous space and to the spine as a channel gushing with radiant emptiness here where particles flash in and out of existence is the origin of mind so lisa nanda asked origin of mind and it's interesting because i don't believe what they mean by mind is brain what they mean by mind is consciousness consciousness it's almost like the chinese medicine idea of mind of heart and thought together because when they talk about the origin of the mind the sanskrit is shunya mana which means void minded and so if you imagine that the origin of our consciousness is the void void that's what we get to experience which is our mind christine asked a question at the beginning she said i get confused over duality and non-duality so in tantra it's non-duality is it non-duality so the interesting thing about tantra is it's the combination of oneness and duality it's experiencing the bliss of oneness within our world it's by rava as in by vijnana by rava tantra which is this text in sanskrit so if you imagine we live in if we live in oneness we are all things everywhere all the time omnipotent omnipresent you know this is the definition of god space and we can feel this sometimes we can sit in meditation and feel bliss you might feel it in an orgasmic state this oneness with the universe and then we go out into the world and we live in duality and we're talking to people or we're struggling with something or we have to pay bills or we are in traffic or something and this is duality and very often it's like well i want to transcend duality and just live in oneness but tantra says no bring the bliss of oneness to the conversations bring the visceral knowledge of infinity to every conversation to every bring love like love when you think of what love really is it belongs in the oneness it's a light it's not definable in this world and yet we know when it's present and not attraction and attachment or anything like that but just love so tantra is all about bringing that oneness into duality bringing our divine into the physical and vice versa it's what makes it quite different than many spiritual paths because some spiritual paths are very much about no i must simply go after oneness and leave the money and the sex and the relationships and the belongings and all that stuff and tantra is like no we're meant to actually be here on the earth experience everything with the awareness that we are all so stardust and we're all so so stardust and part of an infinite galaxy it really makes being alive on earth way more fun because it's almost like you're on vacation somewhere you're like oh this is interesting this being a human is quite fascinating look at all the humans here everyone's so different isn't that interesting as opposed to being attached to that person so different they drive me crazy is there a link between kundalini and tantra it's interesting because so i teach kundalini yoga and they talk about how kundalini yoga is one of the tantric yogas because the intention of it is transformation the intention of it is to clear whatever blocks you so that you can actually become your full self but when i really think about it and when you think of this idea of connecting the oneness and the physical in our world our kundalini is dormant it's hiding if you imagine this disparate experience you have this consciousness of infinity at the crown and then you have the kundalini energy sitting at the root chakra and then we have this body in between that when we really look around at the world is struggling we struggle with struggle with our health we struggle with relationships we struggle with love we struggle with feeling good about being here in abundance and a lot of that is that the kundalini is blocked we're naturally meant to have this kundalini flowing from our crown chakra to our root chakra all the time but it's blocked and so the journey of tantra is to expand that and the journey of a kundalini yoga or something like that is to also release that and when our kundalini is flowing then everything is connected you make that with ecstatic dancing ecstatic dancing exactly to help release the blocks release whatever is in the way of the energy that wants to move like the cool thing about kundalini is you don't have to do something to stimulate it we just have to get rid of what's blocking it and most of its thoughts well it's all thoughts i heard kundalini rising too fast can be scary and detrimental 100 percent you know i have strong opinions about that let's imagine for a moment you're born into a body and your kundalini is flowing perfectly brand new baby that kundalini is nourishing that whole baby easy peasy and then life starts to happen and stuff happens maybe with parents or something things start happening in the world and that baby starts to learn oh okay i can't do this and i can't do this and i can't do this and these little structures start to form around around that baby as it interacts with sort of the shadow world around it and by the time that child is 30 or 40 there's a lot of adaptations that the child has done to survive in this very strange world like we don't live in a utopia so all of these little structures and thought patterns and adaptations are what block the kundalini and oftentimes by that time maybe we have health problems or we're depressed or we have anxiety we have issues and then we hear about this idea that we can raise our kundalini your kundalini is not going to raise spontaneously without doing something extreme because your system your psyche has put those blocks in place or put those particular adaptations in place for you to survive and stay sane that's what they're there for so the kundalini rising isn't going to happen spontaneously and the kundalini yoga that i teach is extremely gentle and it's self-driven you really listen to your own self as you do it as a teacher i don't tell you what to i tell you what to do i i demonstrate the kriyas but you do it at your own psyche's pace this is very very important but no one's ever had one of these weird breakdowns doing the kundalini yoga that i teach but unfortunately this is a big seller in the world and you can go on retreats where people say we will raise your kundalini you'll have a kundalini awakening and you do these very extreme things in a container far far away or maybe they take drugs or they take you know they don't eat for two days or something and do all kinds of whatever whatever and they have an extreme experience so now you imagine all of these very intricately placed structures in your system that you've put there over time to protect yourself that are real they're not a maladaptation they're real and you do a whole pile of extreme things that somehow go and they burst it all open well of course you're going to go crazy that's like taking away someone's crutch you know you've broken your leg you have a crutch and someone takes the crutch away well of course you can't walk well imagine you've got 45 crutches and someone just takes them all away so instead the goal in something like kundalini yoga or even tantra practices is to very gently retrain the psyche retrain the nervous system and this is where sometimes we have realizations or we have emotional releases that help release things that we no longer need anymore so that part of the leg is healed so i don't need that crutch anymore and i just go on without the crutch because that part of me is healed now and then bit by bit we just slowly adjust the body the mind the emotional bodies and we keep going forward and so the kundalini can flow a little bit more and a little bit more but it's very gentle and it's very gentle so unfortunately there were people that hosted retreats like that and go on retreats like that and they come back completely having lost their mind and they kind of have to redevelop all of these adaptations to the world and so it can rise naturally totally totally good it can rise naturally with every aha moment you have every time you have a moment that makes you go whoa and all of a sudden a million programs or a couple programs disappear out of your consciousness your spine straightens a little bit and everything shifts but it's gentle how do we know it has you're happy love is easy you feel good your body feels good everything feels great but again it's really dangerous to seek the big seventh chakra awakening to me that's not how it happens naturally it happens very gently it happens bit by bit like maybe this channel opens here and then all of a sudden your kidneys are starting to work at a higher capacity and then when they start working at a higher capacity the blood is cleaner and then this starts flowing over here and then bit by bit over the process of years you just feel like a different person i don't think it's supposed to be busted out all at once i think it's supposed to be released gently so that we can heal before we drop the crutches so thank you so much for being here hope you have a wonderful day