Self-Realization

In 2016, on the 40th anniversary of my receiving initiation into a guru-disciple relationship with Swami Muktananda, I chose to start honoring the Sun and Earth as my Gurus. The next year I was informed that Muktananda and his teacher Nityananda considered themselves in the lineage of Dattatreya. Dattatreya is famous in ancient Hindu texts as the one who started with nothing and without teachers, yet reached Self-Realization by making the Sun, Earth, the 4 elements, and various animals his gurus.

Shortly afterwards, I was sent the following article about Dattatreya. I have used this gift to root me to my spiritual tradition’s original foundation in Earth and Sun, and to have a guide for my path of transformation. 

In it, I have highlighted the sections that are the most relevant, and the blue highlights are my commentaries on the text. SHE is shorthand for Sun, Human, Earth, and includes the 4.5 billion year dynamic process of Sun and Earth from which our species, and ourselves has emerged. 

There are three Sanskrit words which form much of the essential structure upon which realization and liberation depend. They were much used by Dattatreya and constantly repeated in the Tantrik or non-Vedic Agamas. Oddly enough, they are rarely used in Hindu life today, though they exist as words in most Indian dialects. The fact that they are rarely used today clearly reflects that our modern world is very much disconnected from the natural and authentic ways of being, behaving, and thinking. None of the 3 can be easily translated into a single English word, but fortunately the language is rich enough to convey the meanings with even greater intensity.

The three words are pratibha, sahaja and samarasa. Each must be explained separately. They not only have a unique beauty and charm of their own, but they also represent three great stepping-stones to the Absolute Reality.

Pratibha means vision, insight, intuition, inner understanding, unconditioned knowledge, inner wisdom, awareness, awakening. In Zen they use the word satori. It should not be confused with enlightenment or realization. Patanjali in his wonderful theoretical textbook of varied yoga practices known as the Yoga Aphorisms or Sutras, sees pratibha as the spiritual illumination which is attained through yoga discipline to enable the disciple to know all else.

It is then the insight or illumination which is the open gateway to the final goal. It is the inner transformation which enables the aspirant to distinguish Reality from the sham. In some way it can be visualised as a bridge between the mind and the Real Self. Bridge between abstraction and direct experience. It produces changed people and clarity of thinking as well as being an infallible guide in all undertakings. This is my experience after immersing myself in Nature for the past 9 years, being with what’s real, and distinguishing it's vibratory energy and expansive consciousness from the mentally mediated cultural framework. Some few people are born with it, but seldom to more than a small degree. I certainly wasn't born with it. Nature is our infallible guide to it. And knowing that we need to combine both left and right brain for an accurate experience of reality.

Even this can eventually be obscured by social life and its conditioning. It cannot thrive in a world where we permit others to do our thinking for us. This has necessitated me thinking and acting in ways that are often at odds with cultural norms. The more it is used, the more it increases in intensity. Pratibha is not related to careful thought or deliberation. It is instant in operation and spontaneous in manifestation. For the average Zen student this was regarded as a sufficient attainment. Only those who seek Buddhahood and Enlightenment go further. But this is also a stage which, if once reached, requires no further guidance from a guru or master. My ongoing guidance system is SHE, and my ability to accurately align with Her.  Sometimes it is even spoken of as pratibha-shakti -- the power of illumination. It is most easily developed by meditation or contemplation, and is independent of all religious patterns.  I've relied on meditating in, and as Nature to hone the vibratory quality of purity. And it is free of religious doctrine.

Pratibha is not even exclusively a spiritual concept. Those who have developed this faculty are more likely to succeed in the material world than others. Aligning with Existence isn’t spiritual; it reveals the inherent consciousness/energy which is always present.  Modern Japan claims that most of the big names in industry and commerce today were once successful Zen students. Datta uses the word frequently in the Avadhuta Gita to show that the difficult ideas and the puzzles not easy to understand are cleared away for that disciple who has developed the inner faculty of insight-illumination known as Pratibha. That’s a part of my approach as well; allow the Magnificence (Nature) to dissolve contracted patterns within me.

Pratibha refers to a miraculous vision or knowledge capable of plucking the gems of mystery and wisdom from the immaculate universe. 

The downloads I receive reflect this. It is the Philosopher's Stone which has the divine power to transmute the sordid world of base lead into a golden mass of wonder and harmony. Nature grows plants from compost. But only when you really want it can you get it. Identifying as SHE elicits and cultivates it naturally.

Sahaja -- We are all born with an instinct for naturalness. Within us, is a primordial perfection except inasmuch as the memory becomes buried under the artificial superstructures of civilisation and its artificial concepts. Sahaja means natural. It not only implies natural on physical and spiritual levels, but on the mystic level of the miraculous. By being natural in my physical actions, it naturally opens the pathways of naturalness at the consciousness and mystical levels too. It means an easy or natural state of living without planning, design, contriving, seeking, wanting, striving or intention. AKA play. I've adopted a lifestyle based on this openness and gratefulness to what life wants to bring to me, and I go with what feels like the most growthful opportunities I can.

What is to come must come of itself. It is the seed which falls to the ground, becomes seedling, sapling and then a mature tree. The tree grows according to Sahaja, natural and spontaneous in complete conformity with the Natural Law of the Universe. My experience is that my "consciousness body" is incrementally growing, like a tree, when I'm engaged in my Sol-Earthing process. Nobody tells it what to do and how to grow. It has no svadharma or rules, duties and obligations incurred by birth. It has only svabhava, its own inborn self or essence to guide it. In my practice, I simply allow the growth to take place without any personal agenda or conceptual framework. I trust the reality of SHE, rather than ABC (Agenda Blocks Connection)😉

Sahaja is that nature which, when once established, brings the state of absolute freedom and peace. It is when you are in your natural state, in the harmony of the Cosmos. Seamless in, and as the eco-system. It is the balanced reality between the pairs of opposites. Playing with the polarities is encompassing the whole continuum. As the Guru of the Bhagavad Gita says: "The person who has conquered the baser self and has reached to the level of self mastery: he is at peace, whether it be in cold or hot, pleasure or pain, honoured or dishonoured." Rooted in inner joy no matter what the external circumstance. And identification with the whole supersedes one's personal considerations. Thus sahaja expresses one who has reverted to his natural state, free from conditioning. Who are we as our natural-born essence before our conditioning took over? It typifies the outlook which belongs to the natural, spontaneous and uninhibited man, free from innate or inherited defects. 

In all the Golden Dharmas, sahaja flourishes. In Taoism it was the highest virtue. In the earlier Zen records it is the main plank of training along which the disciples had to walk. The masters demanded answers which were sahaja and not the product of intellectual thinking or reason. The truth only came spontaneously.

Sahaja in Chinese became tzu-jan or Self-so ness. Taoism openly lamented the loss of the peculiar naturalness and unselfconsciousness of the child. Lao Tzu saw that Confucian ethics (which have their counterpart in the modern world) crushed the original natural loveliness of the child into the rigid patterns of its conventions. 

Retirement from such a society became the outer symbol of freedom from the bonds and bounds of conventional society. I've been in the world but not of it. Taoism, as Brahma-Vidya and Zen, saw retirement or renunciation as the only possible way for men to recover sahaja. Escape velocity from society is required to reestablish cosmic flow.

Thus the greatest quality of children again became recaptured by saints and sages. For me, actual physical play, simplicity, freedom in movement and sound, beginner's mind, and nature immersion promote childlikeness.

Artificial clowns throng the world: Only children and saints know sahaja.

Dattatreya tried to teach men that if they had sahaja there was no need to do anything to prove it. It manifested only by the way one lived. Show, don't tell.

The three Sanskrit words Pratibha, Sahaja and Samarasa are related even in meaning, interlocking with each other and together to form a 'Holy Trinity' of liberation. The 3rd, however, is the greater and the most interesting, for it is the one single magic word which contains the Absolute, the Universe, and the World.

Samarasa. This unique word, completely absent from Vedic texts, is found again and again in Tantra, Upanishads and all the best of non-Vedic literature. In one short chapter of the Avadhut Gita it occurs more than 40 times. This whole Gita would be impossible to read and understand without knowledge of this word.

The Tantrik or non-Vedic teachers used the word samarasa in its mundane meaning to suggest higher truth. Samarasa can mean the ecstasy attained in sexual intercourse at the moment of orgasm. Using this, as many other worldly things, to draw an analogy between the moment of sexual bliss and the spiritual bliss of realisation, it was thought men and women would better understand absolute concepts from the examples of relative life.

Going higher, it means the essential unity of all things -- of all existence, the equipoise of equanimity, the supreme bliss of harmony, that which is aesthetically balanced, undifferentiated unity, absolute assimilation, the most perfect unification and the highest consummation of Oneness. It sure sounds orgasmic to me 🙂.

To Dattatreya it meant a stage of realisation of the Absolute Truth where there was no longer any distinction to be felt, seen or experienced between the seeker and the Sought. Seamlessness with Sun, Earth and Universe. Also 5 MEO DMT. Gorakhnath, who wrote the first texts of the Nathas, explains samarasa as a state of absolute freedom, peace and attainment in the realisation of the Absolute Truth. He placed it on a higher level than samadhi. Because it is embodied and it unites the higher spiritual realities with being Earthlings.

Samarasa implied the joy and happiness with perfect equanimity and tranquility, maintained after samadhi had finished, and continued in the waking or conscious state. In this sense, it is a form of permanent ecstasy and contemplation which the saint maintains at all times. Being human DMT. Zen maintains the same concepts, but nothing comparable with pratibha, sahaja or samarasa are found in any of the Black Dharmas of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

In the Tantrik-Buddhist school which existed for about 300 years between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, samaras and sahaja hold a prominent place, and were also adopted by Tibetan Lamaism. The Siddha (my tradition) and Natha sects used samarasa instead of the word moksha. In this way the word became used to express the highest ideal of human life. It is much elucidated in the Agamas of the Shiva-Shakti tradition.

Samarasa is not just a matter of outlook or adjustment of ourselves with the world and its innumerable divisions, or to try and adjust the world to ourselves. One ends in greater conditioning, and the other in frustration. Samarasa must be regarded only as the culminating point of real yoga. The true yogi does as Dattatreya did -- seeing himself in the world and the world in himself, the most perfect harmony of man and nature. Returning to our roots as merged with the ecosystem, and from there merged with Creation.

Pagan India was never a world of universal spirituality. Although it was the cradle of the highest spiritual concepts, the spiritual truth seekers were always, as even now, only a minority. Its great saints and sages were even fewer. Most people sought the world and worldly things, but did, at the same time, accept the authority of teachers and gurus. How many, then, could possibly understand ideas of samarasa, and moksha, and who was truly competent to be regarded as authorities to understand concepts of realisation and liberation?

The answer was their acceptance of the wise authority of those liberated souls who had won the goal. It was not mere blind faith, but the faith born of confidence in those who had undertaken the yoga and attained the goal. There have always been these great souls and there will be in the future. Most of them live and die in obscurity. Very few people I've encountered have expressed any real interest in knowing what I'm doing or in finding out more about it. The true seekers will always find them even if the worldly public never hears of them.

Side by side with these great yogis hidden from the world are the wisdom texts and traditions of great yogis who have gone before. This is the medium by which the real seeker develops the enthusiasm to find the living. Of the ancient past, Dattatreya rises above them all.

But this, the greatest of men, the public has consigned to the inferior position of an object to worship and the resort of those who seek favors.

Dattatreya aimed at the negation of the thought behind things and ideas because conflict exists, not so much in the things and ideas (such as words), but those meanings with which we associate them. Even a correct meaning becomes devoid of value if it is not apprehended. The simple naturalness of sahaja and the supreme ideal of samarasa, must never be lost in meaningless and petty wrangles between philosophies, concepts and mere human ideas.

It is not actually important to solve these disagreements as to be able to stand aside from them completely. When one truly realises oneness (wholeness), then duality and non-duality are only meaningless words and the symbols of delusion. What more is needed to know? The ever-expanding Fullness encompasses both Oneness and Multiplicity in ways our current state of Consciousness as humans is just beginning to comprehend. Now that we have a working knowledge of Existence, and have had it proven that everything is distinct and part of the whole simultaneously, like waves in an ocean, we can more accurately accelerate aligning with it with all our capacities.