The Reason for Everything

I came here for a reason...

I think maybe it had something

to do with finding a better job--

getting out of that miserable, smelly,

deli and doing something of real

value after years of, you know,

underemployment.

Or it might have been

because I wanted your help

with this book I've been

trying to write practically

my whole life--

to find the strength and

courage to finally gather all

my years of reading and research

and hours of meditation into

something that people will

want to read and become

transformed and fulfilled.

I'm almost certain

the reason might have had

something to do with being

old—like, you know—56!

and feeling like

nothing but divine intervention

was going to liberate me from

self imposed isolation,

a $9.50 an hour job and

a twelve year old Subaru

that might or might not

get me to work tomorrow.

But then, O Beloved,

I arrived at your door.

You invited me in.

You held me and kissed me.

And now, my love,

I can't for the life of me recall,

what it was that

I so desperately wanted,

and why it was so important.

MadhyaNandi

2010

                                                  The Light Under The Bushel

                                                      Feel the consciousness of each person as
                                                                          your own consciousness. 
                                                                     Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, vs. 106



This morning, between the front door and
  my old white Toyota,
  I discovered the
  brown smoggy sky
  was an endless meadow of
  lavender and sage-

I reached out my arm,
  which telescoped to
  macroscopic proportion,
  and drew a clutch
  of blossoms to my nose--
  Ah, how sweet a scent!

Do you ever notice
  how the afterburn of
  gasoline on a busy
  street can carry away
  your heart to a sun-
  drenched scene
  where you and your
  lover dance on a
  gazebo while musicians
  play waltzes and polkas
  on shiny brass horns
  and puffing accordions?

What is this world,
  where each step into
  a shopping mall or
  grocery feels like
  floating in a living
  sea of Chanel,
  swimming in an
  ocean of love's
  potion #9?

How came I to be
  so helplessly enraptured?
  Has my ecstasy a name
  to match her scent?

O my lover,
  (and I am laughing now),
  it is Me--
  only Me,
  all Me,
  How could
  there be any
  other?

You there,
  woman with strawberry
  hair and cherry lips--
  We are Me!

And Mister--
  yes, you with that
  little paunch and
  crooked smile--
  Me are We!

Oh, and how do YOU know?
  I hear you doubtful say.
  Such boldness,
  so forthright. 
  What presumption.

Thus, we shall share
  our secret,
  a very simple one,
  not so secret, really--

You see that man?
  Yes, him.
  And, those two women?
  Look at their eyes...

  Do you see?
  Can you see?
  The light in those eyes--
  all of them?

Yes, a light,
  and in everyone's
  eyes.

Beloved friends,
  I have seen this light,
  recognized the light,
  worshiped

  this light
  for what feels like
  a thousand lives
  and have realized
  a small, important thing:

There is only One Light.


Madhya Nandi

 

Tantra and the Three Absolutes

Seduction Inside-Out

You want to know
who you are?

Your Heart beats
within--
Listen, with your
eyes,
Watch, with your
ears,
Feel from inside
your skin--
abandon all thoughts
to the Graceful Percussion.

The hour will arrive
blessed seeker,
when the inner
pulse soars,
and the Heart's
incantation grows
sensuous as the
chaste string
surrendering love
to the bow's
liberating kiss.

Return often,
in devotion,
to listen,
watch, and
feel the
ecstatic rhythm.

In this lifetime,
beloved,
you shall meet
your Self.


MadhyaNandi

On the path to exploring our marvelous humanity, we may discover the transformative power of the Three Absolutes.

Our lives are performed upon a moving stage.  The one constant we all know is that all will somehow and at sometime, change.  Nothing to be feared from change, of course.  The power behind universal movement is none other than our own dynamic will to create, to destroy, to conserve.  

We may long, however, to enjoy that aspect of our essential nature that does not change, is not subject to will or whim, remains ever absolute.

The first absolute is the original Sound.  When we release tension in our minds and bodies, and as the still silence of undifferentiated awareness begins to accumulate in the space of our meditation, we begin to hear that primal sound.  The white noise will have long faded into a relaxing drone.  Beneath that drone a subtler tone may be recognized.  One must listen very intently.  This is the first absolute.  This subtle tone will never change.  Whether one listens now or ten years from now, the tone will remain the same.  Absolute.  The experience of this subtle, inner sound is absolutely and always identical.

The second Absolute is the original Light that dawns within the absolute darkness of meditation that is unbroken by mental and emotional activity.  One recognizes this light when the quality of one's meditative purity arrives at the moment when one realizes that the light that endows all perception, all experience with any possible meaning, it's very recognizableness,  is itself absolute and unchanging.  You may gaze at this light for a thousand years through a thousand pairs of eyes and it will never change.  The light is not any experience in and of itself, but rather is the luminous power that allows life to present itself in the first place.

The third absolute is the child of the unstruck sound and the light of recognition.  When one's meditative being becomes absorbed in the experience of listening to the Sound and observing the Light, one may then surrender the entirety of one's awareness to the copulative friction of the perfect Light embracing the absolute sound.  One gathers the sound and the light into the temple of one's body/mind and surrenders all to the blissful, erotic friction that will resonate throughout the unified field of one's consciousness.  The third absolute is the originative sensation, the copulative friction that is the constant consummation of that light and sound that is the genesis of all possible experience.  When our meditative adventure arrives at this experience, we may be certain that we are experiencing what is essential to the Heart of our humanity.

Author and scholar Georg Feuerstein subtitled his excellent book about Hindu tantra, "the path of ecstasy."  This is an apt characterization of an effective practice of tantra yoga.  Let me suggest another, "the path of adventure."

Tantra sadhana is perhaps unique among spiritual paths that claim meditation as a central practice in that the meditator is allowed and even encouraged to actively explore the rich and complex phenomenology of her own contemplative experience.

This exploration must transpire by virtue of a series of foundational practices.  One must spend substantial quantities of time developing the quality of mental and physical stillness required for increasingly deep inner adventure.  For tantra yoga, mystical wisdom, or insight, cannot be achieved apart from the evolution of one's embodied consciousness.  Tantric aspirants must rediscover how to breathe through hours of daily breath work.  He must literally re-impattern his breathing process.  Her body must begin to automatically breathe deeply and regularly--even and especially when experiencing physical or emotional stress.  

One reason for this transformation of breathing is to stimulate the activity and one's awareness of the activity of the frequency of energy, or shakti, that serves as the "vehicle" if you will, that moderates the specifically spiritual relationship between mind, body and transcendental Self.  Another reason for this transformation of breathing patterns is to enable the practitioner achieve deep states of mental and physical stillness while maintaining maximum power of awareness.  When in meditation one's breath virtually ceases upon arriving at a kind of marvelous "middle" point between the inhale and exhale, then the quality of one's meditative awareness has become quite powerful.  One is then able to gather and focus one's spiritual energy to explore increasingly subtle sensations of consciousness. 

This "middle state" differs somewhat from the varieties of meditative absorption characterized by some of the samadhis described by other Hindu or Buddhist traditions.  The achievement of samadhi, or contemplative absorption is accomplished not by gathering one's attention to a single point or activity, such as the breath or a mantra, but by cultivating a state of maximum openness.  This "open state" occurs when one abandons all thoughts, feelings, images-all mundane content, and abides in increasingly effortless states of undifferentiated awareness.  This quality of awareness is characterized by eyes that are poised and watchful, ears that are open and receptive and skin that seems to 'feel' without boundary demarcating inward and outward.  In this state one's entire instrument of awareness is placed at the service of experiencing extraordinarily subtle phenomenological experiences.  One such phenomena is the subtle OM that one begins to perceive with one's whole instrument of awareness.  One begins to sift through all of the inward experiences of sound to identify a single, unchanging tone.  One begins to experience the amazingly subtle and transformative sensation of this OM vibrating throughout one's inward landscape. This is indeed, as Feuerstein describes, richly ecstatic.

Additionally, one cultivates this state of maximum, contentless awareness to discover other marvelous subtleties.  For example, one may identify that particular energetic vibration that can be called, divine grace.  For this experience, one focuses meditative awareness on the desire for the gift of grace to assist in one's achievement of peace, compassion or wisdom.  As one focuses on this plea for grace, one begins by using the thought and yearning for grace to direct and concentrate one's attention.  In time, however, one begins to set aside this thought and the yearning sensation that one can feel in one's body, to recognize the particular vibrating frequency that this desire for grace produces within one's undifferentiated field of receptive awareness.  One then begins to luxuriate effortlessly with the erotic sensation of this 'yearning for grace.'  The reward of grace often follows.

While tantric meditation uses some of the same tools and techniques of other well-known meditative traditions, the particular intent is to cultivate maximum awareness and equally, maximum openness toward the apprehension and recognition of the unique energetic frequencies that comprise the subtle topography of our universal, immanent/transcendent Humanity.  Tantric meditation serves to unite the erotic essence of pure manifest reality with the transcendental source that is perfectly clear awareness.

The Indian state of Kashmir is home to one of the world's profound spiritual traditions.  A text central to the mystical philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism is the Spanda Karika, or Stanzas on Vibration.  In a nutshell, the Spanda philosophy teaches that universal consciousness, that is, all that is, was and ever will be, is both immanent and transcendent.  Transcendent Being is called Shiva, and possesses the quality of utter and complete "non-thingness."  Shiva, as the human that is Being, can be recognized and reflected upon, but not described.  Nor can He be apprehended except through "anugraha" or His own divine grace.  Only then can Shiva be realized as the transcendent universal Self that all manifest beings always already are.  By our own divine grace we each recognize that universal Being, that native Humanity, the actual Self, that we each and all already are.

Shiva can only be recognized through his own grace by his immanent Self, Shakti.  Shakti is Shiva manifest as spanda, the divine vibratory energy that is each and all of us and the universe we create for our Self.  We can apprehend and recognize the dynamic, pulsing core of our humanity by recognizing that universal, manifold manifestation emerges as a single note, the SOHAM uttered from the throat of Shiva.  The most auspicious realization that a person can experience is the recognition that the only human being that exists is the universal Being that each and all of us already are.  

The divine Heart of Shiva/Shakti is that pulsing center of fabulously erotic bliss that cannot be contained and can only burst forth from the throat of the universal Human to manifest herself as the universe of beings.  The mystical wisdom of Kashmir Shaivism invites us to discover that the grandest experience of enlightenment is also the simplest and most profound understanding of what it means to be human.

The Song Alone


I am the opera diva
in love with the
sensation of my own Voice,
the pulsing bliss of
a Sound belted from
the heated vibrato of
my divine Heart
bursting into song--

Absolute and complete
in myself--
never fearing fear
for death does not exist,
nor dwelling in doubt,
for when nothing is
eaten and all consumed,
only immortality remains
where lust yearned
and hunger failed.

So, surge forth
my fabulous Voice-
Free from constraint,
sated with light,
and summoned to sing
by the Song alone.

MadhyaNandi

Pregnant Pause



You long to
know your Self?

Consider this:
breath never
departs but that
it is returning.

You are the child
of this
marriage of
flow and ebb.

Seeker of wisdom,
find the erotic
sensation
where at once
the breath
comes and goes--
discover this
blissful Between,
and there surrender
heart, mind and will.

Heed this promise,
seeker of Truth,
a flower will grow,
free from time's
hunger,
never thirsting, yet
ever in bloom.

For this, O free One
is the fertile
Heart of Tantra.


MadhyaNandi

Intoxication

"I could while away the hours
conferrin' with the flowers...
if I only had a brain."
The Scarecrow, Wizard of Oz


The sweetest Sauterne
from d' Yquem
flows in the tiniest
capillaries
and veins
intoxicating my brain:

I see myself in
the mirror that
stands ever before me,
reflecting all that is,
was and shall be
in a single blinding
big-bang of ME

This was for such
a long time a shame,
a blight, a disease of
being tossed into the
coliseum arena,
going head to head
with a
heavy-muscled Spartacus,
way outta my league,
in a word: FREE.
Absolutely free.
It is this very freedom
that is the source of our
existential dysphoria,
drunken brawl of a life,
a motion sickness of
the Soul,
set apart from our Self,
fooled into believing
that many exist
and not One:
of here-being whether
or not I wish-- tossed
into so much meaning ,
endless sensations,
and consequences for
everything,
the mere
occupation of a
face and a body
and a vagina--

why oh why did I
marry him instead
of her?
Why, sweetest
lover, did I abandon
my babies for the career
I have never found?
For art still
awaiting birth,
Degrees yet
unconferred,
paralyzed compassion.

When, beloved Pee,
did the disease
become the cure?

Peterson, I will address
the question you have
not asked--

How came I to
be in love with
inebriation alone,
so powerfully
that every sensation,
all thoughts and passions
become intoxicating
merely because they
are, not only
what they are.

Blissful monks in India
have been witnessed
dressing their naked
bodies in feces,
tears of joy
streaming down
their Awakened cheeks.
Why is this so?

We follow the path
of the Exquisite Pain.
There, yes, I've said it.

The Exquisite Pain.
This is the most sacred
secret of tantra yoga.

Worship surrender.
Poor words.
Worship the sensation,
of surrender.

Now, surrender
is always painful.
So fall in love with
pain.
The pain of muscles
stretching,
the pain of
sitting still
hours at a time,
the pain of
displacing thoughts,
opinions and judgments--
what we think is
our personality--
with endlessly repeated
sacred sounds,
primeval prayers;

And, finally, even the
exquisite pain of seeing
the who that you are,
the innermost
essence of your
lifelong Me
playing on the stage
before your eyes
without ceasing,
and you surrender
to the persistent
presence of
that mundane me
until it occurs
that that I
am the Me of all mes,
and that no matter
what I am doing
here and now
I am intoxicated
by the sexy
friction of myself.

Tantra yoga
is falling in love
with the sensation
of being alive.

How many times,
Peterson, have I demanded
of myself: why, girl,
are you doing this?
Why do you work
so hard and are
so in love with
sitting alone
and still
for so
many
hours?

Why do I chant
for days without ceasing?
Cultivate perpetual awareness
of my One and only Self?
Why mainline on
this awareness
of the very fact
of my own life
in all its glory and
ignominy?

I am an addict.
Simple as that.
Addicted to intoxication.
Not satisfied with
wine or needles
or herbs,
lusting for everlasting,
unconditional Uniphoria,
for abandoning all
sensation of being
alone to the
Grace-filled awareness
of being One Community,
a single Personality
infinitely diverse and
marvelous,
a humungous
red heart beating,
a big clit
pulsing with pleasure
and all the
love that's fit
to present.

Surrender what ails
you long and diligently
and by Grace
the disease
recognizes itself
as the cure.

All addiction ends
in a steady fix
of One Big Person's
personality--
looking, seeing,
smelling and hearing--
touching myself all over,
caressing my heavenly
blue breasts,
fingering my terra cotta
cunny,
laughing, oh yes, my
lover Peterson,
each day,
every moment,
watching Our Big
Reflection in the
mirror,
knowing that all this
Stuff is me:
The skin of my
man's rosy cock,
currents of His thoughts
convecting in the
cauldron of his goofy
Peterson mind.

I am Kate Bush
singing to me now
about the hounds of
love, swapping places,
and running up
hills, and down into
valleys and canyons.
Engaging switchbacks
zig-zagging a spiraling
path upward toward
where the clouds
break and that
sky is so clear
and sweet that
only one rhapsodic
gulp is required
to change forever
the pattern of
this eternal instant
of spontaneous ME.



Madhya Nandi

Basic Principles of Practical Tantra

1. Enlightenment=Performance.
2. The sensation of one's own presence is the means for accomplishing enlightened performance.
3.  Absolute sensation and absolute awareness are one and the same.
4. Enlightened performance is neither linear nor chronological and arrives from the womb of a deep and immediate Present.
5.  Enlightened performance emerges from the perfectly still lake of a personhood, (manifest awareness as mind/body), free of all agitation.
6.  Immersion in the perfectly still lake of one's awareness is gained by surrendering ever more subtle frequencies of sensation to the original Sensation from whence the manifest emerges.
6. Discovering and pursuing the spanda (particular pulse or frequency), of Surrender is the means for realizing performance enacted from the womb of an awareness free of all agitation.       
7.  Effective guidance, training, practice and faith, are essential to the quality of Surrender required for enlightened performance.

An artist friend had promised to draft a design I'd given him for a tattoo that I'd planned for several months. I'd offered him payment, but he'd refused. It took me a couple of months to set aside the cost of the work I wanted done.

I hadn't pressured him at all, but when only a couple of weeks remained before the appointment I'd made with the tattoo parlour, I'd mentioned it to him. He replied that it was absolutely no problem. I didn't pressure him.

A week before I planned to get the tattoo done, I again reminded him. He said, sure, it was no problem. Finally, the day before I planned to get the tattoo done arrived. I met my friend at work--he was also a co-worker. He said that he'd been up all night talking with a friend and barely managed to drag himself to work, let alone remember to bring along the drawings he said that he'd completed.

I said, "Well, o.k." He said that he'd call me the next day.

I was peeved. This was an event I'd worked up to for several months. The tattoo marked a new phase in my life. My last tattoo had been years before, in the midst of another life phase.

I sat to meditate, set the alarm, got comfortable.

I focused on my annoyance. I brought to mind my friend's face, his voice, our phone conversations, other conversations. I thought about him staying up all night chatting with his friend, a mutual co-worker, whom I also knew. I focused on how it made me feel that after staying up all night talking, my friend had simply, "been too thrashed" to remember to bring the renderings that he had promised. I focused on my feelings of doubt that he'd actually cared enough to complete the design.

I found where the sensation of my annoyance produced tension in my body. I focused my awareness on that place, on that feeling of tension. The sensation, the shakti of annoyance, was a tangible presence that I could reach within and touch with the focus of my awareness..

I followed the feeling of this vibration of annoyedness for some time. All other thoughts and sensations dissipated and departed.

After awhile, the frequency of my annoyance brought me face to face with the whom that the annoyedness had affected. I looked at that whom. I recognized the whom, since it was myself that I recognized.

The self that I recognized was the same me that I had always been, each and every moment of my life. All the events that had ever transpired during my life belonged to this me. The funny thing, however, was that this me that I recognized and knew had always been me--was always the same. I'd never been without this me, but this me had never been affected or changed by any thought, feeling, relationship or circumstance of my life. The me that I recognized was like seeing the light of being aliveness in my own eyes. It was more like the screen, or canvas, the background against which the time and activity of my life played.

This light was not itself the specific activities of my life, yet it somehow was responsible for there having been a "my life" at all.

My focus became fixed on this immutable me-ness. It was vast and deep and consuming, and yet--really, nothing at all. This me was absolute, whatever it was, it was that.

I became lost for a time. When I opened my inward gaze, I saw my husband standing before me.

He took my hand in his and we walked together. I began to hear the musical sound of water flowing. As we approached the source of the growing sound, I felt the percussion of thundering water in the ground beneath my feet.

When we arrived, I saw that from more than a hundred feet above, a frothing cascade of water rushed downwards. My husband stepped aside, and I saw a lake so clear and still that the sky and the clouds were perfectly mirrored on its surface. To my astonishment, I saw that the roaring waterfall descended on the lake and entered its water without a splash, without creating the merest hint of a ripple in the lake's crystal smooth surface.

My husband said, "Come on, let's swim." He threw himself into the water and began to swim about, rolling and turning like a porpoise. "The water's fine," he said. "Come on in!"

I followed him into the lake. The water was wonderfully cool and soothing. I dove fully into the lake and emerged, my hair wet. Yet when I shook my head, my hair seemed to throw off its moisture without releasing a drop of water. I stood in the waters of the lake and watched my husband swim.

I asked him, "How is it that your arms and legs churn and kick, but not a single drop of water is displaced?"

"If the lake refused my body," my husband said, "how could I enjoy my swim?"

He rose and walked toward me. He cupped his hands, lifted some water and offered me a drink. I drank from his hands. The water tasted sweet and pure. "If the water did not surrender to your need, how could your thirst be quenched?" he said.

He reached out his hands and held my face. He leaned in and gently pressed his lips on mine. "If your lips could not feel, how could we enjoy our kiss?"

The alarm sounded. My big poodle, Jack, nudged my leg with his nose. "Enough quiet time," I knew he meant. "Time for my walk."

We went for an evening stroll.

Who?

Who invites the pain
of loneliness,
the anguish of still-born
ambitions,
the abuse of employers--
even the senseless
loss of a prodigal child?

Who accepts these gifts
of surrender,
and gives for the giving,

the melodious ecstasy of
a single tone,
a lamp that shines in
a delicious dark,
and finally,
following a long
journey--

a bath in
a mountain lake
where cascading waters
fall in fury,
but enter
in stillness?

Who raises you,
naked and newborn,
from the womb of
a loving Heart,
kissing your tears of joy,
caressing your emptiness?

Who is this,
whose love is
free to enjoy
and for all
to discover?

Who?

MadhyaNandi
1996