The Light Of Consciousness: Radiance Sutras Verse 137

Today we are reading from the Radiant Sutras.

This is a book written by Lauren Roche and it's a translation or an interpretation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra,

Which is a beautiful ancient text.

Vijnana means many things,

But essentially it means wisdom,

Not knowledge,

But the wisdom we know in our soul.

Bhairava is the essence of life,

The essence of who we really are.

It's that aspect that we can't describe.

In some interpretations Bhairava means the terror of life.

It's that powerful.

It's not just,

Oh,

We're stardust.

No,

Life is serious.

Life is powerful.

Life is terrifying.

It's thrilling.

It's confusing.

Bhairava.

And then Tantra means teaching or book,

Actually,

In this instance.

So Vijnana Bhairava Tantra,

The wisdom of the essence of life.

And so this is a series of,

Well,

There's actually banter verses at the beginning,

Which is a discussion between Bhairava and Devi.

So it's essentially a discussion between our highest self and our human self,

Or between Shiva and Shakti.

And it's not that the masculine is God and the feminine is lower or something like that,

Because in Tantra,

The Tantric worldview is God,

Oneness,

Whatever you want to call that.

This is what they would call Shiva-Shakti,

Not separate,

Just Shiva-Shakti.

And then in order to create duality,

Shiva-Shakti separates,

And Shiva is pure consciousness within all of us,

And Shakti is the manifest world,

All of us.

And the idea of this Shiva-Shakti,

Oneness and duality of Shiva and Shakti,

Is that both of these things are actually happening at the same time.

It isn't that I live in duality,

And when I meditate or something,

I experience oneness.

I mean,

That may be how it actually happens.

But the reality is,

Is that in every single moment,

We are both Shiva and Shakti,

We are both consciousness and manifest,

We are both our highest self and our most struggling human personality,

All at the same time.

The goal of Tantra or the journey of Tantra is to make these two aspects or two ways of being a little bit more interwoven.

We don't have to be completely divine all the time,

And we don't necessarily want to be completely lost in our human personality either,

Because this is the core of suffering.

So the idea is that we blend them together.

We blend,

It's almost like if you imagine a Venn diagram,

You know,

And this circle is our divinity,

Our highest self,

Our pure Shiva consciousness,

And this other circle is our human experience.

How overlapped are they?

Are they separate,

That we're always seeking that,

Or they overlapped sometimes,

And they overlapped a little bit more,

And a little bit more,

And the idea of Tantra is that they overlap a lot.

But overlapping them is a very gradual process.

It can happen in moments of enlightenment,

But very often,

If you imagine this as a Venn diagram,

In the moment of enlightenment,

You are completely together,

But then life happens,

And the circles slowly drift apart.

So,

But maybe they don't go quite as far apart.

So after the Banter Verses,

There's 112,

They call them Yukti Verses,

And then there are the Insight Verses,

And this is where we are now.

And if you want to listen to some of the other ones,

We have a playlist here called Radiant Sutras,

And it has all the recordings up until this point.

So now we're in these Insight Verses,

And so,

And we can drop in any time,

Right?

We can start anywhere,

Because there's always these little things that just,

Little gems that touch us inside,

That just start to grow.

But at this point,

We're really in the ethereal world,

Just as a warning.

It's not,

This isn't necessarily the sexy,

Grounded discussion.

This is kind of that,

Okay,

Let's really play in the mind.

Let's really play in the expansive imagination,

So to see if we can kind of feel this.

So that's what we're doing.

And today we are reading 137 on page 151.

And for anyone following along in the book,

You'll notice that there's actually verse 137 and 138 on the same page.

It's kind of just two paragraphs.

And I was going to do it together like they have it here,

But the two verses are actually so different,

And each one has their own depth.

So we're actually going to do them separately.

We'll do 138 next week.

So I'm going to read this,

And then we're going to have a discussion,

And go from there.

So let's all close our eyes.

And just breathe deeply,

Expanding the belly as we inhale,

Contracting as we exhale.

The light of consciousness illumines the world.

The world reflects this splendor.

Energy and matter,

Essence and manifestation reveal each other to each other.

What does that mean for you?

Or what thoughts roll through your mind when you hear that?

That feels like vibration and resonance.

The word mirror comes to mind.

Like matter and energy interacting,

That you can't have one without the other.

Energy and matter equals Shiva and Shakti.

Totally.

I can help heal deep emotional disconnects when doing so is aligned with my inner being and higher self.

Yes.

Before I read the interpretation,

I just want to comment on that.

I was reading a book on the weekend.

They were talking about the curious aspect of a spiritual journey,

And that there's two parts,

Two ways of being.

And on the one hand,

When you're on a spiritual journey,

You're changing and growing.

You're decreasing unhappiness.

You're building new ideas about the world so that we can see it in a different way,

So we can be happy.

You know,

There's that personal healing aspect.

And at the same time,

On that spiritual journey,

Is fully understanding that you are perfect.

That we,

Every single person here right now,

Is a reflection of the divine.

Imperfection.

If you were to take the resonance of the divine,

You,

Exactly as you are right now,

Is you are perfection.

And that there are no imperfections.

It's like looking at a tree,

And you see a tree growing,

And you don't look at those branches and say,

Well,

That branch is,

You know,

Bent in a funny way,

Or that tree is short,

And that tree is tall,

And there are no imperfections.

It's a tree.

It's a perfect tree.

It's the same as us.

So it's a very interesting journey to fully accept that we,

There is absolutely nothing to do.

If we did nothing in our life,

In terms of changing our life,

Editing our life,

Healing,

Anything,

We could literally sit on our porch,

Take a deep breath in,

And just enjoy ourselves.

We don't have to think about rotten things.

We don't have to worry about things.

We could just connect with God,

With consciousness,

With divinity,

With oneness right now.

However,

We are human.

And we were given each an interesting assignment.

And within that assignment,

There are bumps and bruises along the way.

So that's what we're here to do.

We're here to take that journey,

Whatever it is.

But the most powerful thing,

As Devi said,

Is to do so in alignment with our highest self.

That's all we have to do,

Is remember that we are this divinity.

Like,

This is the primary teaching of Tantra.

It's not out there.

It's us,

Every single one of us.

So I'm going to read another translation.

This one comes out of this book,

Vijnana Bhairava,

Or The Divine Consciousness by Jai Deva Singh.

So this is a direct translation.

It's not quite as poetic.

All things are revealed by jnana.

For example,

The knowledge or self.

And the self is revealed by all things.

By reason of their nature being the same,

One should contemplate on the knower and the known as one and the same.

This is why we love Lauren Roche,

Because that's the interpretation.

I'm going to read you one more,

Which is equally as cryptic.

Knowledge reveals all,

And the self of all is the revealer.

One should contemplate on the knowledge and the knower as being one and the same.

So let's ponder that for a minute.

So you are the knower.

You are.

And everything you know,

And what we mean by know,

It could be something you actually intellectually know,

But it could just be you gazing at a tree.

So you are looking at the tree.

To truly contemplate the idea that you and the tree are one.

That the knower and the known are the same.

And this is where,

This is like a real experiment in our imagination,

In our ethereal self.

This isn't something just to be taken.

But when we earlier talked about how Shiva and Shakti,

You know,

Separate.

Shiva is consciousness observing Shakti.

And Shakti is the living manifestation of Shiva.

They are the same,

Yet they're different.

But they are also oneness.

So if you are gazing at the tree,

You are Shiva.

You are observing.

You are consciousness.

You're observing.

You're not manifest.

In that moment,

The most interesting aspect of you is you observing the tree.

The tree is the object of your observation.

So it is Shakti.

So that tree is a manifestation of your consciousness.

You are the same.

The first time I ever heard anything like this was in quantum physics.

And a lot of you guys have heard this before,

If you've been around me much.

They have an experiment they call the double slit experiment.

So over 100 years ago,

They did an experiment.

They took a wall and they cut two slits into the wall.

And then beyond the wall was another solid wall.

So they stepped back here behind that slitted wall,

And they shone a light at the wall,

A single light.

And sometimes the light went through one slit and sometimes the other.

But the curious thing is on the far wall,

It showed a wave pattern.

So it was like if you imagine light going through two points.

And you know,

If you imagine like in water,

If you throw a pebble in the water,

It creates rings of waves going out.

And if you dropped two pebbles in the water,

Some of those waves would overlap each other.

And what would happen is they would create bigger waves and lower waves,

Like where the waves interacted.

Sometimes they would cancel each other,

And sometimes they would make bigger and lower troughs.

So this is essentially what they believed is that what they were seeing on the far wall was the interaction of two wave waves.

And that's why they were seeing this really curious wave pattern on the back wall.

So someone said,

Well,

You know what,

It'd be really interesting to know when does the light go through this slit or go through that slit?

You know,

I wonder how often that,

Because,

You know,

Scientists like to count things.

So they put a measuring device on one of the slits to kind of count how often light went through there.

And of course,

This is also in a time when it was a question as to whether or not light was a particle or a wave.

This has always been a question,

And it is perpetually a question.

It is still a question.

This is not resolved.

So the funny thing is they put this measuring device by one of the slits and redid the experiment,

Shone the light,

And all of a sudden on the back wall,

Instead of this lovely wave pattern,

There were just two lines of light.

And kind of like what you would expect if light was a particle,

Like imagine if light was a particle and you shone a light through a slit,

On the far wall,

You would just see a line of light.

That would make sense.

And that's why they were so confused as to when they shone it through the slit,

It showed up like a wave pattern.

So then they took away the measuring device and repeated the experiment.

And all of a sudden,

The light was a wave again.

And it didn't matter how many times they put different kinds of measuring devices or whatever.

If they observed the experiment,

The light would act like a particle.

And if they didn't observe the experiment,

It would act like a wave.

This is a foundational issue in quantum physics.

How can,

By observing something,

What you observe changes?

So now let's just think about that in terms of our current verse that we're reading,

Our sutra.

If the knower and the known are the same,

Do we actually change what we see?

Because we're actually the same.

Do we share a resonance?

Do we alter it?

Well,

The funny thing is they did these studies forever and ever.

And then eventually they realized that this is a real thing.

And they started to discover in many scientific experiments that the intention of the experimenter,

Of the scientist,

Was skewing the results of whatever the experiment was.

It could have been a drug test.

It could be,

Will the mice go this way or that way?

If the experimenter,

If the observer wants this result,

The experiment would always result there.

It would change.

Another person would do the experiment with different results.

And this is why they started doing double blind studies.

This is how real this is.

That all of science,

It's now accepted that you have to do a double blind study because the effect of the observer is so powerful that it will change the results of a scientific experiment.

Isn't that crazy?

So David Bohm,

Who is my favorite quantum physicist,

He was fascinated with this.

And it was just mind-blowing,

Right?

And then one day his wife picked up a book written by Jiddu Krishnamurti called The Knower is the Known or something like that.

And she's like,

Um,

This spiritual teacher is talking about the same thing you're talking about in your double slant experiment.

So he met with Krishnamurti and they became fast friends for 30 years.

And you can find videos of the two of them talking on YouTube.

It's like just awesome.

Because this is such a known thing that you cannot separate what you see from you.

Like,

Now just imagine this for a minute.

I'm not even saying that the tree,

Well,

I am saying that the tree is actually consciousness.

But if you observe a human being,

It could be your lover.

It could be your friend,

Your sibling,

Your parent.

How you see them is determined by your mind.

Like what you see in this person,

It's not discernible from you.

Do you know what I mean?

Like you can't,

You can't be objective.

You can't look at something without interpreting it with your mind.

So every single person here could,

We could,

I could just pick a movie star.

And I could say,

What do you think of this movie star?

And I'll tell you right now that every single person here would say something different.

Because it's all our opinion of that person.

What we see,

What we see in that person is based on us.

There is no other reality other than what we see.

And we can all look at something and have completely different experiences of it.

The knower is the known.

There's no separation.

Our Shiva consciousness uses the mind to observe Shakti manifestation.

But they are the same.

And this isn't an incorrect thing.

Like it's not a character flaw that we are subjective when we look at things,

That we see our own version of things.

This is as it's meant to be.

Whatever we are seeing,

It is,

It is our reality.

So in the original reading,

The light of consciousness illumines the world.

So this is our Shiva.

The world,

Shakti,

Reflects this splendor.

The light of consciousness illumines the world,

And the world reflects this splendor.

So to imagine this,

That you are observing the tree,

Or you're observing a loved one.

You are the light of consciousness.

Every time our mind observes something,

This is the energy of consciousness.

This is the energy of Shiva,

The energy of God,

Observing creation,

Which of course is God.

But we are observing self.

And that's where in one of the translations there that we are observing self,

And as we observe self,

Self reveals the divine to us.

It's all the same.

And this is where it's so interesting,

Because sometimes when we're on a spiritual path,

We think we need to take this ethereal reality and bring it down into the earth.

And there's an aspect of that,

To bring that divine consciousness into our day-to-day lives.

But our day-to-day lives reveal divine consciousness.

If we pay attention,

If we're fully present,

We are surrounded by joy.

So every morning I wake up,

I drink this little bit of lemon juice,

And I make myself a latte.

And then,

I'm going to turn the camera here,

I sit in this wingback chair.

If you're listening to this later,

There's a wingback chair,

And a nice little poof for my feet.

And I pull the blanket up over me,

Because it's still cool here in the morning in Canada.

I turn on my little light,

And I open my book,

And I read my latte.

And I drink my latte.

I don't open my latte.

And this morning,

I woke up,

I did this,

This is my little process every morning.

And I was sitting there this morning,

I set my coffee down on the table,

I was sitting there,

I pulled the blanket up,

And I was filled with thankfulness.

Oh,

My chair and my blanket.

This is a bliss state.

This is pure divinity,

Right here on earth.

Like,

We imagine it always to be some full-body orgasm on the Himalayas or something.

It's all around us.

It's the tiniest moment.

It's sitting somewhere and,

You know,

Watching a puppy play or having,

Like,

It's just.

.

.

It's everywhere.

And so then suddenly,

Imagine this really interesting dance,

That we walk around and we kind of infuse,

Like,

Let's say when I think about infusing the divine into my life.

It's like,

Let's say something is a muck between me and my partner.

Sometimes funny things are said and then funny triggers happen and you're kind of like,

You know,

And emotions rise.

For me,

The question is always,

Am I quiet enough to take a breath,

Ask of the inside,

What's going on here?

And ask for guidance in that moment,

Before it escalates into anything weird.

And so I ask within,

Maybe I get an answer,

Maybe I don't,

But at least I stopped for a moment.

So in those kind of ways,

In a very practical way,

We can bring the divine into our life,

Into the challenging moments.

But then we also get to observe the beauty in every aspect of our lives.

There's a thrill here.

There's a joy here.

Nina,

That gets the heart,

What we see is what we see.

That can be turned to self.

What is reality?

Answer questions.

So this is the funny question,

Right?

This whole,

What is reality?

Which I think is actually an impossible question.

Because when I think of that,

I kind of think of a snake trying to eat its tail kind of idea.

Here and now.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because the whole idea of duality,

Right?

So imagine again,

And I'm just talking within a tantric realm,

Right?

That you have this oneness,

This reality of oneness,

Shiva shakti.

And then you have this reality of maya,

Of duality.

That for some reason,

Which is beyond our scope,

This curious world of duality,

This curious world of physical things,

Or that are all made up of energy.

Every single physical thing we see from my hair,

To that mountain,

To that tree,

To this cup of water,

It's all just animated energy appearing physical.

So what is reality?

And they'll say that maya is an illusion.

But it's not a bad thing.

Maya being an illusion doesn't mean it isn't real.

It doesn't mean that it doesn't matter.

It doesn't mean that it's,

I don't know,

Some big universal lie or something.

This is the playground.

You know,

This is the Disneyland.

This is what we're doing.

This is what we're playing at.

Awesome.

And we get to explore it.

Our consciousness gets to explore maya.

We get to explore earth.

We get to explore it through the assignment we were given.

I am in this game.

I am Katrina Voss.

I am 55 years old.

I live in Canada.

I have two children.

I teach tantra.

This is my role in the game.

And we each have a unique and interesting role to play.

And it's an interesting game.

But we can do that game also remembering that we are divine oneness.

We don't have to forget,

As Geneva said,

That all the world is a stage.

We don't have to forget that we are also pure divinity.

But we can't walk around in life going,

I don't care about that.

I am pure divinity.

That's no fun.

That's not interesting.

What's interesting is holding that in our hearts and knowing it,

And then diving in off the deep end.

Do it.

Be completely 100% you.

That's the point.

Just to fully explore this whole experience.

And the key,

Of course,

Is to experience your experience,

Your uniqueness.

And it's interesting.

So I'll be 56 in a few months.

And I find myself in a very curious time of growth,

Where I have this theory or this idea,

Because a lot of my friends and sisters and people are going through the same thing.

And I was talking to my sister the other day,

And she was really trying to find herself.

You know,

After years of living in the corporate world and working in the corporate world,

She's home on a stress leave.

And we were talking about how she completely lost herself over time and all that.

And I said,

The question is,

What does stem cell Barbara really want to do?

Like,

If you were to go down to your roots,

Your stem cells,

Your DNA,

Who are you really?

What do you really want to do?

And what I find is,

For a lot of the people in my world,

You know,

We're in our 50s.

And we've had about 30 years of playing personas.

It's like,

Oh,

I had when I became a mother,

I had to be now a mother.

When I became a wife,

I had to now become a wife.

When I'm a business owner,

I now have to do this.

And sometimes it's not that I have to,

It's that I want to.

Right?

I see that person and I want to be like them.

So actually create a persona out of my own hopes and dreams.

And I want to be like that person.

And I find myself in this time going,

Wow,

Who am I really?

And this is the journey.

It's almost like getting back to the original assignment.

Because when we really,

When we really live our genuine assignment,

It's almost like,

I remember years ago,

Someone compared it to a kaleidoscope.

And I'm not going to do this well,

Because in my mind,

It makes sense,

But I don't know if I can say it in English.

That imagine our life right now is like a kaleidoscope.

You know,

The kaleidoscopes we used to have that,

You know,

The long tube and you turn them and all the things change in here.

There is a perfect version of you.

And that perfect version is your stem cell self,

Your real self,

No personas,

Nothing put on.

It's purely you,

No shoulds,

No nothing.

And they likened it to holding a kaleidoscope and you're looking through it and it all looks jumbled and crazy.

And you keep turning it until it's your perfect self.

Your perfect pattern,

Nothing in your mind,

Nothing that your parents think would be a good thing.

Nothing the neighbors think would be good.

Nothing that other people would think you're successful doing or enlightened or whatever,

But actually authentically you.

And that every single one of us would turn that kaleidoscope differently.

And this comes back to our original teaching here.

The light of consciousness illumines the world.

The world reflects this splendor.

We are the world.

When we are authentically ourselves,

We are filled with splendor.

And it's hard to fathom because we've been given very strange role models for what the ideal person looks like,

What the ideal person has accomplished,

What the ideal person's life looks like.

And it's all nonsense.

The second part,

Energy and matter,

Essence and manifestation reveal each other to each other.

That's what we were talking about earlier.

Energy and matter,

Essence and manifestation reveal each other to each other.

Isn't that wonderful?

And it's interesting,

Like even when we look within our bodies,

Our minds,

That you can imagine your mind,

Say your mind is energy and your body is matter.

This is where in a holistic mindset,

You would look at the physical body.

And as we looked at the elements in the physical body,

We would also consider the mind.

Because they're not disconnected.

So as we look at the body,

We kind of ask ourselves,

What is this revealing to me about my mind?

It's funny,

I'm reading another book called Neurodharma by Mark Hansen.

And in there,

He talks about the importance of the mind.

And the mind,

You know,

Because in yoga and tantra,

It's so important to actually clear this,

Right?

And he was saying,

You know,

That so often we can be mindful of the body,

But we are always bodyful of the mind.

Because our mind is our nervous system,

Runs through our entire body,

You know.

So the last thing I want to mention is,

So this journey of this sutra is all about knowing that we are everything around us,

Right?

That the knower and the known are the same.

And what's crazy is as bizarre a concept as that is,

So I just had this vision of,

You know,

Like you're walking down the street,

And to imagine yourself allowing yourself to become the world around you.

You know,

Sometimes it can happen in nature.

We can be so flooded with the smells,

The sounds,

And the peace in nature.

We actually feel like we are one with it.

The knower and the known are the same.

It's not always as easy walking down the street where you live.

We can imagine it,

You know,

Earlier we talked about a retreat in Costa Rica,

Not my retreat,

Just we were talking,

Someone had gone to a retreat.

I don't have a retreat.

And that,

I was in Costa Rica,

I don't know,

20 years ago.

And it was the first time I had ever swum in a warm ocean.

An ocean.

And I walked in and it was like bath water.

And I remember being able to close my eyes and feeling like,

Whoa.

And you disappear in the water,

Like you just disappear,

Your consciousness lets go.

This is possible.

And when we do that,

When we have these moments that we become our surroundings,

We have merged Shiva and Shakti.

We have merged the divine and the physical.

And we experience Samadhi or bliss.

And it's interesting because they basically say that a human being's experience of Samadhi,

There's infinite different ways to experience it.

If you imagine a continuum,

Every single point is a possibility.

But there's essentially two general groups,

Let's say.

One is you have this moment,

You have a moment of awareness.

And you're just like,

Oh,

I get it.

And then shortly after,

You just slip back into duality.

And I mean,

Deep into duality.

Suddenly you're mad at this and you're upset about politics.

And you're just,

It's not that you're all in,

You're all in duality.

But you have these moments,

Little moments.

And they stay with you as little moments.

So that's kind of one end of the spectrum of our experience of Samadhi.

And at the other end of the spectrum,

We have a moment,

We have an experience where it all blends together.

And we actually are forever changed.

That that awareness stays in our heart all the time.

Even when life is happening all around us,

Even when there's pain and suffering and challenge and difficulty and all the things,

Relationships,

Finances,

Work,

Everything,

You never lose that equanimity inside.

You never lose that peace,

That centeredness through it all.

And these are kind of the two ends of the spectrum of this Samadhi.

And I mention this because it's okay to actually feel peaceful amidst chaos.

It's okay that even if you,

Because sometimes we feel guilty because there's things going on around us or there's things going on even in our lives and people are like,

Well,

You should be really upset about this and this should really bother you and all that kind of thing.

But when you know this,

Everybody here who have been on Insight Timer,

Whether you're new or you've been here for years,

We know this.

And sometimes we just get pulled into the world that doesn't know this.

But you can stay in your center and it's a dance.

You know,

We can't always stay there.

Sometimes we dive in headlong into the fray.

It's okay.

We find our way back.

It's like,

Imagine walking down the street.

So let's say this is,

We won't do a formal meditation.

Today,

But just imagine you're walking down the street and you understand that you are embodying the eyes of Shiva.

You are observing your creation.

You are Shiva observing Shakti.

Imagine and maybe you go and you see a stream or you see a home or you see a car.

Or you see people and you are observing creation.

There's something really beautiful about it.

Let's just close our eyes for a moment.

And I'm going to read the sutra in Sanskrit and then in English.

Just close your eyes.

I just feel this feeling of truly being one with all.

Breathing deeply.

Imagining the mountains,

The oceans,

The forests.

Imagining the people living their lives,

Doing their thing.

Imagine the gardens,

The bees,

The dogs,

The cats,

The animals,

The fish.

And you are one with all of these.

We are all part of the whole.

Bhavayat.

The light of consciousness illumines the world.

The world reflects this splendor.

Energy and matter,

Essence and manifestation reveal each other to each other.

All right.

Well,

We will see you later.

Hope you have a wonderful week.