Merging With The Mystery: Radiance Sutras Verse 65

So today we're reading out of this book called the Radiant Sutras and this is a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

And this is really interesting especially considering the sutra we're going to look at today.

Vijnana means wisdom in the most broad,

General,

All-encompassing sense.

If you were to imagine the wisdom that we all seek about life.

It's almost not specific.

It's this general understanding so that we can live within it with some kind of sense of purpose and direction.

Bhairava is not easily translated but it's essentially the essence of life.

Whatever that is.

You know it's almost like when we wonder what is the meaning of life and why are we here and who am I really and what is this world and all that kind of thing.

Bhairava is the truth.

Bhairava is the essence of all of that.

Which of course is impossible to describe.

It's something you can feel.

The path to that is the path of Tantra is to feel Bhairava.

To live it.

It's almost like we live our day to day life.

What do we think about?

We think about well what am I doing for work today or who am I going to talk to or do I have enough money for rent or what am I eating today or whatever or what's going on in this relationship or what's going on politically or whatever.

We think about all these physical aspects of our life which are very important.

Tantra is not about transcending our life.

Tantra is about living fully in this experience.

The challenge is when we only focus on the physical aspects of our life we actually get lost in them.

We end up having all these emotional responses to the ups and downs of all those things.

We get completely lost in those emotional roller coasters and we end up not actually enjoying life.

We end up,

Even if we have something good happening,

We're so afraid of it disappearing or losing it.

Then all of a sudden something bad happens and we think oh my god I'm going to stay here forever.

We end up getting lost in this curious focus on the world.

But that's not the nature of the world.

All of this is just an experience.

In some ways it's like a movie we're watching and yet it's something we're meant to fully engage in.

But how do we fully engage in it without getting lost in it,

Without getting lost in a place where we no longer enjoy it?

Well we understand what's inside of it all.

It's almost like if you can understand the essence of every single experience,

Every single interaction,

Not only does it have more meaning,

It doesn't own us.

Suddenly losing that job is just a fluctuation in maya.

You just sort of look at it and say,

Huh,

Maybe we grieve for a while,

Maybe we're upset for a while.

Also there's this understanding inside of the essence of being alive.

We may have lost that job but I'm still alive.

I'm still here.

There's still a thousand possibilities because we understand the nature of Bhairava.

We understand the nature of infinity.

We understand the nature of God,

Consciousness,

The infinite field,

The quantum field.

However we want to describe it,

We understand that.

And so it's okay.

We'll get another job.

Maybe there's a better job coming.

Maybe that relationship is over.

Well,

There's nine billion people on the planet.

I wonder what's coming next.

And it's not about being aloof and it's not about transcending it or whatever.

You've been to the beach a hundred times and you love lying on the beach.

And you have all this visceral memory of the sun on your face and swimming in the ocean or the lake and it's in you.

You don't even have to articulate it.

And so maybe there's a long winter stretch.

Like I live in Canada.

There's a long winter stretch often.

Not this year but normally.

And I personally don't like winter.

I don't like being cold.

I'm kind of a naturally cold person so I don't like being cold.

I'm more like a snake that wants to lie on the rocks and absorb the heat.

Right?

That's more me.

But why is the winter okay?

Even if I don't like it,

I'm not really that big on snow.

Because I remember sunshine.

I remember that there's more to life than this.

There's more to life than the struggle.

And that's why we study something like the Radiant Sutras.

There are 108 sutras.

There's 108 passages that we read that help us remember the essence of life.

And when we can have that consciousness inside of us all the time,

We get to actually embrace every aspect of life.

We get to embrace the highs.

We get to embrace the lows.

We get to embrace the limbo states.

We embrace all of it.

We laugh like crazy when it's funny and awesome.

We cry and we grieve when it's sad.

But inside of all of it,

There's this knowing that these are the joys of life.

This is understanding vairava.

This is the core of being tantric.

Of really walking through life knowing,

With a knowing.

That's what we're doing.

So every Monday,

We read a sutra.

We discuss it.

We dive deeper into the meaning of it.

And then we do a meditation.

And then there's a playlist here on Insight Timer called the Radiant Sutras.

And it has most of the sutras that we've done.

Today we're doing number 65.

There aren't 65 up there,

But they're pretty close.

Every so often the recordings don't work.

Either because they're super sexy.

We're not allowed to have sexy things on Insight Timer.

Or for whatever reason,

The sound quality wasn't good enough.

Or there was construction outside.

Or my dog was chewing its bone or something.

So the sound quality wasn't good enough.

But most of them are up there.

So if you ever want to go back and listen to some more,

There's lots and lots up there.

They're in order from the beginning.

So we're reading number 65 today on page 100.

It's interesting considering we're having our total eclipse today in some parts of the world.

So even if you have the book,

I highly recommend this book by the way.

I'm not an affiliate of the book.

I just think it's the most beautiful book of a tantric journey to have sitting by your bedside.

To wake up,

Open it up like a hookum,

And just read today's sutra.

Whatever that is for you.

And let it be your contemplation all day long.

That's the real path of tantra.

It's a very subtle unwinding of ourselves.

It's a lifetime journey.

So even if you have the book,

Let's close our eyes for a moment.

Let's breathe deeply.

Let's tap in to our eternal self.

That part of you that is exactly the same today as it was when you were six years old.

The same essence of you when you will be 90.

The same essence of you when you will be 90.

Maybe it's within your heart center.

Wherever that is.

All right.

Close your eyes and imagine an expanse of terrible darkness surrounds you.

No objects,

No light,

No moon,

No stars.

Nothing but blackness spreading to infinity.

Do not shrink in terror.

Do not turn away.

Give yourself to the blackness with no hope of light.

Surrender completely.

Contemplating this feeling,

Merge with the mystery of night.

How does that make you feel?

Are there words that are rolling through your mind when you hear that?

Viscerally alive.

Infinite.

Surrender to the darkness.

Acceptance.

Curious.

Scary,

But a good scary.

The mystery of night become part of that mystery.

It reminded me of a time when I was in a boat.

It was so dark that I couldn't see the horizon.

It's scary at first and then deep peace afterwards.

The mystery of night become part of that mystery.

It reminded me of a time when I was in a boat.

I wonder why he starts with terrible darkness.

Maybe setting us up to question the notion of terrible.

So the word Bhairava,

One of the definitions of Bhairava is terror.

The terror of reality or the terror of living.

But it's not terror like a horror film.

It's like there's an edge of being alive that's real and important to embrace.

One of the biggest challenges in our modern world is the false comfort that we live with.

So where does this false comfort come from?

It comes from a false system that we believe in.

That if I get the right job,

I will feel secure and happy.

If I look a certain way,

I will always have company and feel loved.

If I have a certain amount of money,

I will be famous or I will be respected and therefore I will feel important or I will feel good about myself.

If I live in a certain part of the world,

I will feel safe.

If I live in a certain part of town,

I will always be safe.

I will always be respected.

If I am respected,

I will feel good about myself and I will love my life.

If I have two children,

I will be happy.

If I leave my marriage,

I will be happy.

There's all these ideas that it's almost like these are the constructs of the society we live within.

If we do this and this and this and this,

All will be well.

Real dark nights of the soul happen when we have done everything according to the constructs that we have been raised with and we end up in a dead end.

We end up depressed,

Anxious,

Lost,

Despairing.

All the things we were ever taught in school,

By the church,

By our family,

Didn't bring us to happiness.

And suddenly we are faced with having to dismantle all of those constructs.

Everything we ever learned and the reason we adopted them is because they promised comfort.

They promised peace of mind.

They promised a certain prestige in the community because we were told that that was important,

Whatever that is.

That's terrifying.

That's terror to be faced with having to walk our own path without anyone telling us that it's the right path.

This is really scary.

If we believe that the constructs bring us comfort.

But what if there's no such thing?

In the book of Joy,

Which is a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu,

Desmond Tutu talks about the problem is that human beings don't understand how fragile their life actually is.

That we are one phone call away from everything changing.

And again,

This isn't a depressing thing.

It's called the Book of Joy.

Because the problem is that we so cling to all of the false comforts,

Almost like false idols.

The things we worship,

The all important job,

The all important money,

The all important family,

The all important church,

The all important whatever.

The all important,

I don't know,

Political beliefs.

Whatever it is that we cling to and worship and we are willing to stand in the fire for or whatever.

They don't bring us joy.

But as soon as we let go of those things,

As soon as we let go of these constructs,

We aren't meant to be constructs.

We're not robots.

We are organic beings who are perpetually shifting and changing with nature,

With the world,

With the energies,

With the planets of everything.

We are always shifting and changing.

So imagine for a moment we actually released the constructs inside of us and we allowed ourselves to openly shift with whatever this moment is asking for.

Imagine.

So on the one hand it feels very edgy.

There's a,

But what if it doesn't work?

What if I let go of something that was important and what if I make a decision that is wrong and it takes me down the wrong path or what if,

What if,

What if?

These questions,

This is the real edge of life.

We should never stop asking those questions.

We should never stop wondering,

Is it the right choice?

Isn't it the right choice?

I don't know.

I mean it might be,

It might not be.

But you know what?

I'm going to do it anyway.

That's exciting.

Well I'm going to just do it.

This is what I feel called to do.

I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it.

This is exciting.

This is living in a way that makes life interesting.

Doing new things,

Trying new things,

Listening to our inner self,

Changing,

Growing.

There has to be a little bit of terror in it or else maybe it's not even real.

Maybe I'm just making decisions within my comfort zone.

And of course to understand that Tantra is a spiritual path.

This isn't just willy-nilly,

You know,

I read a book that said that I could,

You know,

I don't know.

It's like there's all kinds of books out there and here are the four things you should do and you're like,

You know what?

I'm going to stop everything and I'm going to do those four things and that's going to guarantee me happiness,

Weight loss and seven figures.

You know,

A seven figure income.

Tantra is a spiritual path where we sit in meditation and we ask for guidance and the guidance says,

Do this.

And you're like,

Really?

That's terrifying.

That don't mean anything weird.

It could just be shifting something in your business or shifting something in your relationship or having that talk that you haven't wanted to do or starting that exercise regimen or learning how to play the guitar,

But you're an introvert and you're afraid to play in front of somebody.

It doesn't have to be horror movie scary.

It just has to be edgy.

Living at that growth edge of who we really are.

Bhairava.

Like the real essence of life.

So then what happens is when we understand the fragility of being human,

The very miracle that we were born into this Maya,

This existence that we actually get to play human for a while,

That we get to play with all these other people,

Whether they're our family of origin who we so don't understand or get,

Whether it's the person we live with and love,

Whether it's our children,

Whether it's our family,

Whether it's our business,

Whatever it is,

The very fact that we get to play is like a miracle.

How fun is that?

We get to play this crazy game and sometimes it hurts and sometimes it's awesome.

But there's a thrill in that and when we get it,

When we get how fragile that is,

That anyone in our life could disappear tomorrow.

Anyone could not be here tomorrow.

That is how fragile life is.

The job we depend on might not be there tomorrow.

That's how fragile life really is.

And again,

This isn't like a big scary thing.

Well,

It is a big scary thing.

But what happens when we fully embrace that?

When we fully embrace it?

This is why people who have near-death experiences often come back with what they call the big picture and things don't bother them anymore.

And every single moment is precious.

And every single moment we love.

It doesn't matter whether it's getting stuck in traffic.

Suddenly you're just thankful that you have a car and you've got a great place to go and you're hanging out and breathing and maybe you put on some great music and just hope you don't have to go pee or something.

And you just get it.

When you get the fragility of life,

Every time you see someone,

Even if they have driven you crazy in the past,

You look at them and you just see them as another human on the earth.

It doesn't mean you have to hang out with them.

It doesn't mean you have to spend your time with them.

It just means that,

Wow,

What a journey this is.

And there's a gratefulness,

There's an excitement,

There's something inside.

We were out for a car ride yesterday,

Sunday afternoon,

And I had this urge to go visit a friend of mine who I haven't seen in five or six years,

But we were really close years ago.

I tried calling her,

But she didn't answer,

But something in me said,

Let's go find her.

And the irony is,

I didn't even know where she lived because she had moved since the last time I saw her.

So I googled her business and luckily on her Facebook page,

It had her address on it.

So off we went to go and find her,

And sure enough,

She was there and she was home.

So we got to go in and have a lovely visit with her and hang out.

Well,

She has four children,

Her partner has two kids,

And her kids are now all teenagers.

And she was saying to me,

You know,

So you can imagine how busy her house is.

And she's a very interesting person.

She's surrogated two children,

And that's actually her business.

She has a surrogacy company.

So she's had a very,

Very interesting life.

And she said to me,

She goes,

You know,

About two years ago,

I woke up and I realized that my children were no longer babies.

And I was filled with so much sadness.

You know,

When my kids were little,

I found it very hard.

There was a lot of reasons,

But I found them very long days,

And they were very hard.

And everyone always said,

Oh,

Enjoy it now,

Which is really a depressing thing to say,

To hear when you're really struggling,

And you're busy,

And you're kind of losing your mind,

And you haven't slept properly in four years.

But it's true.

You know,

As I was sitting with her,

And I was chatting,

And I said,

Wow,

You know,

When you think my kids are 28 and 26 now,

Isn't that crazy?

And we were kind of reminiscing a bit about the old days,

You know.

When we get it,

Suddenly we look at our kids,

And we just,

You just absorb them.

For me to be able to sit with an old friend like that,

And just take in every word that she's saying,

To just take in her essence.

How precious is this?

If you have a partner to crawl into bed with them at night,

No matter what the day was like,

And you look at them,

And you're like,

How precious is this?

This is the power of Bhairava.

So I'm going to share with you a little bit about Bhairava.

How precious is this?

This is the power of Bhairava.

So what's interesting about this sutra,

Is this sutra,

We have to remember what the sutra was all about.

The sutra is all about closing your eyes,

And seeing the darkness within.

And what's interesting is,

Our consciousness will take whatever form we focus on.

So if our day-to-day life is all about the pleasures of life,

It's all about the things we own,

The money we want to make,

Whatever,

Whatever the things,

The mundane parts of maya,

The things we accumulate,

The things we lose,

Whatever,

That is what our consciousness will project into the darkness.

So we close our eyes,

And we see the darkness inside.

What is our mind filled with?

Is our mind filled with thoughts of the day?

Thoughts of our worries,

Concerns,

Issues,

Anger,

Emotional,

What's in there?

It's almost like the darkness simply becomes a blank screen for us to project all of whatever it is we worry about onto it.

This is why we do yoga.

This is why we meditate.

To be able to see all of these programs and these stories that we're constantly running in our heads.

It's almost like we're watching a soap opera on repeat in our heads,

Over and over and over again.

So suddenly we close our eyes,

And in the darkness,

We just project it like a movie screen into the darkness,

To the point that sometimes we don't want to close our eyes.

The number of times I've taught meditation in public groups,

In different places,

In hospitals,

And there are people there,

And ironically,

Seldom the participants,

But often the facilitators that hired me,

Or the psychologists,

Or the nurses,

Or whoever are there actually taking care of the group while I'm teaching,

The number of times that they're like,

I'm not closing my eyes,

You have no idea what lives inside of there.

So suddenly our journey becomes to clean up that inner consciousness,

To look at the programs and say,

What is that?

Which is why we practice pranayamas,

Not just sitting quietly.

We practice breath techniques,

And we actually do things to heal our nervous system,

To truly embrace whatever is in there,

And to slowly let it go,

To slowly release all that.

Because the idea is,

Most of our life we will spend walking around eyes open.

Now if I close my eyes,

And I have a blank screen inside my eyes,

And I am projecting all of the thoughts and fears and worries and stuff that are within my consciousness on that black screen,

What am I looking at when I look at the world around me?

And I see things happening in the world.

If I'm projecting it on a blank screen,

How are those preconceived ideas,

Fears,

Worries,

Constructs being lived out in the world around me,

And in the people around me?

This is what they talk about when they say that we project ourselves onto the world around us.

This is why 12 people can watch something happen,

And they'll have 12 different stories about what happened.

So this meditation is all about becoming comfortable with just the darkness.

To practice not putting anything in there,

Allowing ourselves to just see the darkness for what it is,

Without projecting anything at all.

And then what happens,

Because this is a practice,

You might want to do this meditation every day for a while.

And just sit and focus in the darkness.

And then what happens is,

Something inside of you opens your eyes,

Even though your physical eyes are closed,

And you start to look into the darkness.

You start to look at it.

And you're like,

There's more here than nothingness.

The darkness has a quality to it.

It has an everythingness to it.

It's not empty.

The darkness is rich.

The darkness is where we came from.

There's a saying,

They say that we are the ocean in a cup.

We are all infinity within this consciousness.

So if you imagine the great ocean,

What makes up the ocean?

The water.

And you go and you take a glass,

And you fill that glass with ocean water.

Well the water now takes the form of the glass.

This is the same thing with our consciousness.

Whatever it is we think about,

It will appear in every single thing we see.

Every person,

Everything.

So let's imagine for a moment that you can fully embrace the darkness.

And what that means is we're fully embracing Bhairava.

Imagine that when you close your eyes,

You actually come to a place where you come to a transcendental consciousness.

That you're fully in the world,

But you know there's more.

And so you close your eyes and you see this darkness,

And you know it's darkness,

But it's almost like your very consciousness sheds light in the darkness.

Then of course,

What happens when we start walking around the world?

That transcendental consciousness sheds light everywhere we walk.

It sheds light on the people we talk to.

It sheds light on situations in the world.

It sheds light on difficult times.

This is why our whole world begins in our consciousness.

Because we cannot see the world objectively.

We only see it through the lens of our consciousness.

I recently came to face a core negative emotion.

I haven't yet felt pain like that intentionally before.

Yet again,

Getting familiar with it is something I am embracing with her.

We are still getting to know each other.

So good.

I want to read a little passage.

So in the Radiant Sutras,

Lauren has these little meditations at the end of the book that go with each sutra.

So I want to read his commentary about this.

Because it's really beautiful.

This is a meditation on darkness.

In your mind's eye,

See darkness spreading,

Diffusing everywhere into infinity.

Embrace the blackness and become one with the body of infinite I AM consciousness.

Darkness is a mystery,

Both terrifying and blissful.

I tend to be somewhat afraid of this practice,

Even though it is the very first meditation I did as part of the scientific research on meditation in 1968.

I usually feel a kind of shudder,

Like when jumping into a cold pool or ocean when I meditate on darkness.

There is a set of strange sensations until I get used to it,

And then it is such a relief.

There was a season in 1972 when,

Over a period of months,

I sensed darkness coming from the back of my brain,

Spreading forward and threatening to engulf me.

It was a creepy background sensation,

As if black tar was taking over my brain.

This happened so slowly that I was only subliminally aware of it.

I instinctively recoiled from it and thought I was depressed.

Finally,

One morning,

It got intense enough that I consciously noticed it while meditating,

And I gave in.

Once I relaxed into it,

The darkness quickly spread throughout my brain,

Body,

And the space in front of me.

It was restful.

I turned into inky blackness,

And it was sort of refreshing,

Like slipping into a warm bath of pure blackness.

It changed my cells,

And that was that.

I had been clinging to the light,

Apparently the light side of the yin-yang's dynamic,

And now I was letting the opposites dance in me in their own way.

Even though I typically arise at four in the morning and do yoga and meditation in the darkness,

Loving the resonant silence,

I have to return to this sutra again and again.

Isn't that interesting?

To not be afraid,

To know that it's what we're made of.

We are made of all the night sky,

And we are made of the sunshine,

And the rain,

And the snow.

We are all of it,

But it's like we've been taught that only the light is safe.

Only this.

Don't look at that.

It's like,

No,

But we're so big.

We're so big.

Every one of us.

We are all these infinite beings.

You know,

Trevor shared about losing his job.

We've gotten to know each other through online courses and stuff.

He's a great,

Huge being.

Infinite possibilities,

Infinite hope and wonder.

We're all like that.

Who knows what's coming on the horizon?

And it doesn't mean we don't have emotions about loss,

And it doesn't mean we don't have fear.

The fear is normal.

The terror of being alive.

This is normal.

If we didn't have feelings,

If we didn't have worries,

We wouldn't be alive.

We don't want to be in some catatonic state where we don't feel anything.

This is it.

This is life.

This is the juice.

This is when 10 years later we look back and go,

Wow,

That was a roller coaster,

But I never thought I'd end up here.

What a blessing.

Does anyone have any thoughts or comments you want to share before we go into our meditation?

And I reread the sutra.

My year of darkness has slowly led to the light.

Alright,

Let's close our eyes.

You can be sitting,

Lying down.

Whatever feels right for you.

Let's just breathe deeply.

Feeling the belly expand as we inhale.

Contract as we exhale.

Feeling the ribs expand as we inhale.

Contract as we exhale.

Feeling the belly,

Ribs,

And upper chest expand as we inhale.

And contract as we exhale.

And I want you to imagine sitting on a bench outside and seeing a dark sky.

No stars,

No city lights,

Just darkness all around.

No trees,

No buildings,

Just darkness.

And to allow whatever feelings rise as we inhale.

Just darkness.

And to allow whatever feelings rise inside of you.

To just rise.

And in your mind's eye as you see the sky.

Look all around you.

Seeing only darkness.

But in your mind's eye,

Your eyes are wide open.

Looking into the darkness.

To imagine that this is what we are made of.

Every cell of our body is 99% darkness.

Dark matter,

They call it.

Not nothing.

The great Bhairava.

The great unknown source.

The plenum,

The quantum field.

We are all beautiful energy composed of this amazing essence.

And as you look around at the darkness.

Smile.

Allow it to wash over you.

Allow it to wash over you.

To nourish you.

To let it fill the corners of your being.

With awareness.

Of reality.

Keep breathing in this beautiful darkness.

Knowing that it is everything.

Just like you are.

Close your eyes and imagine an expanse of terrible darkness surrounds you.

No objects,

No light,

No moon,

No stars.

Nothing but blackness spreading to infinity.

Do not shrink in terror.

Do not turn away.

Give yourself to the blackness.

With no hope of light.

Surrender completely.

Contemplating this feeling.

Merge with the mystery of night.

Let's take a deep breath in together.

Keep our eyes closed.

Exhale.

And in your mind's eye,

You're still sitting on the bench.

And now imagine the sun starts to rise.

And you're actually looking upon a village,

A community.

You're on a hill.

You see the houses,

The schools,

The businesses.

You see people going out for a morning run.

Walking their dogs.

You see trees,

Birds.

Holding this beautiful vision of Bhairava.

And witnessing the manifest world around us.

What does that feel like?

What does it feel like for you?

To see the world through these eyes?

I would love to know how you're feeling if you want to share it.

Total eclipse of the ego opening to light.

Full and inspired by the darkness and the light.

I could not go in fully.

I will work on it.

I had extreme fear of the darkness as a child.

So maybe that's it.

It's so important to have grace with ourselves.

When we have fear of the darkness,

Who knows why.

It's so important to take baby steps in all of these things.

We don't know if there are past lives that are rising.

That really were good reasons for these fears.

Just to always be very gentle and aware.

And then to pray about it.

And to ask,

What can I do?

What do I need to see?

What do I need to understand to heal this?

And to take our fears very seriously.

You know,

Nothing rises for no reason.

All of these things existing in and through darkness.

Ready to walk down to the village.

I keep thinking about falling.

And the fear of falling.

And it's just what is not known.

Thank you so much for being here.

And I hope you have a wonderful day.