Intoxication, Negative Examples, and Immersion

Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for satsang and get real about all the questions we humans want answered. Intimate, courageous, heartfelt spiritual talk about pretty much everything. So happy you are here! A podcast from Satsang with...

Show Notes

Welcome to our weekly Satsang with Shambhavi podcast. Shambhavi and the Jaya Kula community gather for intimate, courageous, heartfelt, and often humorous conversations about spirituality, politics, culture, and pretty much everything. Published each Wednesday here and wherever podcasts are found.

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Shambhavi Sarasvati is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization offering opportunities to practice in the traditions of Trika Shaivism and Dzogchen.

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Thanks for listening! And much love to you, wherever and however you are.

What is Satsang with Shambhavi?

Join Shambhavi Sarasvati for a weekly exploration of self-realization, death, love, devotion, and waking up while living in a messy world. Satsang is an ancient spiritual practice from India. It means "being in reality together." During satsang, people gather with a teacher to learn, ask questions, find community, chant and sing. Shambhavi gives satsang in Portland, Oregon and elsewhere. The dharma talks offered here are recordings of the live satsang.

Shambhavi is the spiritual director of Jaya Kula, a nonprofit organization. Her training is in the View and practices of Trika Shaivism from Kashmir and the Dzogchen tradition of Tibet. She is a householder sannyasini and a devotee of Anandamayi Ma. Visit jayakula.org for her full teaching schedule and more information.

Shambhavi's books include Mother Poems and A Crack in Time (2025), The Reality Sutras: Seeking the Heart of Trika Shaivism (2018), Tantra: the Play of Awakening (2012), Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life (2009), Returning (2015), and No Retreat: Poems on the Way to Waking Up (2016). All of Shambhavi's books are available on Bookshop.org and on Amazon.

Hi, this is Shambhavi.

Welcome to my weekly podcast about spirituality,
love, death, devotion and waking
up while living in a messy world.

The Satsang with Shambhavi podcast is recorded
live each week with students of our
non-profit community, Jaya Kula.

For more information and to find out
about attending a satsang, visit jayakula.org.

Thanks for listening.

Much love to you wherever and however you are.

STUDENT: Hi, I wanted to ask
about fragmented self.

Stephen mentioned that phrase and I was like,
wondering about how Shiva nature is
the big Self and then we feel fragmented.

Why did you use the word fragmented self that day?

I wanted to know.

SHAMBHAVI: The fragmented self that I made reference
to in the poem we were reading
about a hand separated from the body.

The hand is what grasps, it's what grabs.

So I think that's what
the Rumi poem was referring to.

So I was saying that when we feel that we're
separate beings, we always have
this sense of fragmentation.

We're trying to create a sense of self out
of a bunch of constructs and concepts,
received ideas from our cultures.

We have different ways that our
desire expresses itself.

Basically, fragmented means that we're
still experiencing anavamala.

Anavamala is a Trika term, as you know,
that means a feeling of separation.

And we can contrast anavamala with samavesha.

Samavesha means a feeling
of immersion and continuity.

When we're still experiencing
separation, what does that mean?

It means that we are still perceiving in a real
way that we are separate bodies in space.

And when we're experiencing samavesha,

it means that we are actually perceiving
that we are continuous with a whole.

That sense of partness doesn't really exist.

Once we are feeling more immersed and continuous,
there's a whole lot of work we're not doing.

All the work to create this sense of self.
Internal conversations and decisions
and all that kind of stuff.

We're simply not doing that work anymore
and there's a sense of profound relaxation.

Once you experience that, the thought of going
back to that work?
Ugh. It's like, ugh, no.

I couldn't even do it if I tried.

The thing is that when you have this encounter
with the natural state, with that continuity,
that great continuity,

it is completely non-different from
this kind of devotion and sweetness and

delight and enjoyment and this intelligence
that is not captured by anything that we know of.

When we're experiencing samavesha,
we're not just experiencing some mechanical sense
of continuity between ourselves and other people.

There's no such thing.

It's not just like, oh, I'm looking into space
and I don't feel any difference from you.

If that's all it were, okay,
that would be kind of nice, I guess.

But that is so, so minuscule compared to what we
actually experience,
which is being immersed in this Self that's just

full of all these qualities.
Just like we are, right?

But completely unbound and in their
most pizzazzy, pristine form.

I mean, there's just a sense
of brilliance about everything, right?

That is so magnetizing.

That's why I think once we have contact with that,
as Ma said, it's that which we
discover and then which causes us to not

want to discover anything else ever again.

It's just so magnetizing that everything else just
kind of becomes meh [laughs],
like bothering to construct a self in any way.

Other than playfully.

I think there is a sense of cosplay going on on a
cosmic scale, but it's not taken very seriously.

Constructing a self is really exhausting.

It's something that we spend a lot of time doing.

And I think even if we're engaged in it a lot,
our body, energy, and mind still
somewhere knows how exhausting it is.

On many levels, we express that we want to be
relieved of the burden of the self,
the burden of this individual self, I mean.

And we express it when we numb out. Numbing out is
a way of being relieved of the burden of the self.

We express it when we become
addicted to substances.

That's a way of being relieved
of the burden of the self.

We express it when we try to find refuge
in romantic love and a sense
of merging with one other person.

Even in a more micro way, people who are always
looking for other people who are the same as them.

Sometimes when people try to befriend me,
they said, oh, we're so alike.

I think you and I are so alike.

And that's an expression of wanting to be
relieved of the burden of the separate self.

So if you're already relieved of the burden
of the separate self, you don't really need
to be around only people that are like you. [laughs]
Turns out.

Then when we do spiritual practice,
we want to become, you know, one of the phrases
that's used in Trika is God-intoxicated.

There's a direct relationship between spiritual
intoxication and literal intoxication,
the motivations for them.

This is just something I've talked about a lot.

I mean, I grew up in a family of addicts,
so it's something I've been
contemplating a lot in my life.

And I got invited a really long time ago when I
was living in San Francisco to give
a talk at a Zen center about addiction.

That set me off on this course of thinking about
how the impulses for addiction and for spiritual
life, they have a lot of similarities.

And then of course, we're doing spiritual practice
and we also have that yearning to
be more engaged, more integrated, less separate.

So these are all expressions on a micro level.

The only difference between all the stuff we do
to numb out and forget ourselves and all the stuff
we do to wake up and be relieved of that burden

of individuality or separateness.

The only difference is one leads to freshness
of mind and more skill and more
intimacy and a better life.

And the other leads to the opposite of that.

But we all want the same thing.

We're just expressing it different ways.

And this is the teaching that I've been giving
since I ever taught anything, which is
that there's only one desire in all of existence.

All desire, regardless of what the object
of desire is, all desire is expressing the same
thing and pretty much feels the same way.

But it's the object of desire
that changes as we wake up more.

And then finally, what is desire?

So all those desires,
even the desire for realization or spiritual life,
even those desires have objects.

They're directed towards something.

But Lord Shiva's desire,
the desire of this reality, is objectless.

It's simply this desire to express,
like a natural desire for self-expression.

And that's where we end up with all
the playfulness because that desire is just
expressing itself freely in all these

different forms in a playful way.

STUDENT: I've been getting it reflected
back to me that some of my obscurations
have been amplified recently to a point that they

have become very clear.

That has helped me develop and
work on them more clearly.

And if you could talk about this process that it
gets a little bit worse when
it starts getting better.

SHAMBHAVI: There's many, many ways that that can
happen, not just one way.

But if we're not aware of something at all,
or we're only partially aware of it,
or we're only intermittently aware of it,

and then we become more aware of it,
of course it feels more intense.

Maybe we become more consistently aware
of some habit pattern that we have.

Maybe we stop forgetting it.

You ever have somebody in your life,
or maybe you are that person who constantly is
having the same realization over and over again,

like every two years they
have the same realization.

Our karmas are kind of like floating ice flows.

They kind of go back under
and then they come up again.

But if something appears and remains,
then you have this experience.

Oh, I'm experiencing this more.

It was always the same.

It's just you didn't have as
much awareness of it before.

Doing daily spiritual practice
will make that happen.

Right now, what we have on earth is all
of the most
entrenched patterns in our lives being mirrored

to us in these grotesque ways that you have to be
in some really weird condition not to see because
they're writ so large. So many more people are

seeing and if we're being good practitioners we're

not just running around proclaiming how outraged
we are or how upset we are at other people.

We are also looking in the mirror and finding how
aspects of our own self are reflected
in these grotesque behaviors.

Maybe we're not being as grotesque.

I mean, I don't think anyone here is being as
grotesque as Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu.
But there are aspects of them that are part of our

cultures and part of how
we're groomed and trained

to be and we can look in that mirror and then it's
like, uh-oh, I see something of them in myself.

That's how we should be using these events
in addition to all the other ways
that we're interacting with them.

I don't know if that's what you were referring to,
but that's just another way.

I've just always learned from negative examples.

And when we come into more spiritual maturity or
just maturity as a person,
that's something we can do.

Instead of running from every negative example or
trying to define it as something completely
separate from us,

we can have the courage and the clarity to see how
we might be connected to it somehow and learn
more about ourselves and work with that.

So yeah, this is absolutely an unavoidable part
of coming into more awareness and maturity.

STUDENT: I would love to hear you talk more
about learning from negative examples.

And we hear some examples of how you've done that.

SHAMBHAVI: I grew up with some
negative examples and felt
something in myself responding to that.

It wasn't really an intellectual process.

But one thing I was mentioning to somebody
the other day is that my parents socialized.

They went to parties and had friends and stuff.

But they never invited anyone over.

When they socialized, they always
went to somebody else's house.

That was a negative example to me growing up.

I didn't want to have a house like that.

And so I made a conscious determination.

When I have my own place to live, the door
will be open and it's going to be open house.

Why did I think that?

Why did I not think, oh,
it's really nice to go out to a party
and then not have to have anyone over?

Someone might have thought that, right?

But for me, that was a negative example.

I wanted to have a house full of visitors,
full of guests, and I do.

I grew up with someone
who was very self-concerned.

My father was a very, very anxious person.

Not like...

expressing a lot of insecurity in an everyday way.

That wasn't how he was anxious.

There was this deep seated anxiety in him
that I don't know if I could ever define.

But when you looked in his eyes,
it looked like a storm.

It was very difficult for me
to look directly at him.

The pain in his eyes was almost too much
for me to bear when I was growing up.

And one of the things he taught me was that when
you have that kind of pain, that kind of anxiety,
you can't care about anybody else.

Everything in his life was wrapped
up in trying to manage that somehow.

And that being said, he also laughed a lot.

You wouldn't meet him and think,
oh, he's insecure.

He was very social.

I would say even gregarious.

And he was known among his friends
for having a good sense of humor.

And he was creative.

So it was kind of an interesting situation.

But I was always aware of that pain
and of how wrapped up in himself he was.

He was very critical of other people.

He was really anxious about us
doing certain things as kids.

Like he never wanted us to take risks physically.

He was very anxious about that and just
everything related to him.

I mean, he was a narcissist.

So I just determined that I did not
want my life to be wrapped up in myself.

I saw what that was doing and how
that made a horrible life for a person.

And caused so many problems for a person.

And I determined I didn't
want my life to be like that.

I can't really explain why I was like that,
but we see something that doesn't resonate
with how we want to live and we just

make a decision to live differently.

That's how it's been for me anyway.

STUDENT: Did you say samavesha?

SHAMBHAVI: Yes, samavesha.

STUDENT: Samavesha?

SHAMBHAVI: Yeah.

STUDENT: And you said that's
an experience of continuity.

SHAMBHAVI: It means immersion.

STUDENT: Immersion.
Is that an experience that comes and goes,
or is that an underlying state or constant state?

SHAMBHAVI: It is our constant condition,
but we don't know it most of the time.

So we aren't creating it.

But we are able to recognize it more and more as
we go along until it becomes our
constant condition in a conscious way.

It's always our constant condition,
just not in a conscious way all the time.

So there's a long period of time in our practice,
for most people anyway, where our
awareness of it does come and go a lot.

Anandamayi Ma said, coming and going,
the thing will be done.

That's what she was referring to,
coming and going out of greater recognition
or awareness of our natural condition.

Coming and going from that,
we will eventually be established in that.

STUDENT: Is that like an
energetic experience or is
there anything else you could say about that?

SHAMBHAVI: No, it's not just
an energetic experience.

STUDENT: Is that part of it?

Is it some kind of body experience?

The reason I ask is I'm just a very body-based,
full of energy type of person.

So I just was curious.

SHAMBHAVI: Well, that might be a way that
you begin to experience more subtlety
in your relationship to reality.

But that's not where you'll end up.

That's nothing to hold on to as a concept.

I would throw out the sentence,
I am a very body-based person.

Right now, that's where you're at.

But you're also a wisdom-based person.

So we say in this tradition that we have
three ways of experiencing our existence.

We have a physical body.

Almost everyone has an experience
of their physical body.

We have an energy body.

And most people have at least a little
experience of that, but, you know, not everyone.

And then some people have
a lot of experience of that.

And then we also have what's called a wisdom body.

In this kind of tradition,
particularly the Tantrik traditions from India
in general, both within India and in their

reception in the West, there has been undue
emphasis put on energetic experiences.

This is because we're collectors
of experiences and accomplishments.

If we had to say, I'm going to become immersed
in a wisdom far vaster than anything I could ever
totally embody [laughs],

we're basically saying I'm not all that.

But if we can say, oh,
I had this energetic experience.

My Kundalini did thus
and such and blah, blah, blah.

I had these siddhis.

Then we're basically using spiritual practice
to maintain our sense of separation
for the greater glory of ourselves.

Really, when we start to recognize that wisdom

and energy and physical life are never separate,
they're the same thing,

just experienced three different ways.

But when we start to be more in touch
with that wisdom aspect, then the sense of control
that we have over our lives greatly diminishes.

That's a very shorthand way of saying that,
which might actually be so shorthand
that I'm giving a misperception.

But we become more skillful, but we also become
less of the decision makers in our lives.

And our lives become more
guided by this greater wisdom.

So many people have an experience of that too.

I'm sure you do also, of being able to feel the
wisdom in a circumstance or feel like you're being
told to go in a certain direction or have

a spontaneous sense of something
that isn't just energetic.

It's more like a communication.

All of those things are aspects of our wisdom body
or what we call our wisdom
body just for convenience sake.

Eventually, if you do this practice for,
I don't know how long, no promises,
but eventually you will feel like you're

just in an ocean of living wisdom.

Now, to me, that feels marvelous.

But when that first became more apparent to me,
it was actually terrifying. [laughs]

I went to a friend of mine and I said, I feel
like guru's everywhere and I don't know what to do.

I'm just so afraid I'm going to make a mistake
because I feel like I'm constantly being
ordered around and told what to do.

And I don't really know if I'm hearing
correctly and blah, blah, blah.

But that was just a phase. That faded.

I realized that there wasn't a me in the sense
I was thinking of to make a mistake.

So it didn't really matter.

In any case,
yes, we should pay attention to energetic
phenomena that are happening in our opening

in the way that we're unfolding spiritually as
people, but we don't want to get stuck there
thinking that's the be all and the end all.

So don't have a concept about it.

It's not the main event.

It is something that happens along
the way and that will continue to unfold.

But the main event is the getting of wisdom
and being in relationship to living wisdom.
That's the main event.

I was just thinking the other day,
because being in this kind of tradition,
in any Tantrik tradition from India,

if you're teaching in any tradition like this,
there's always students coming around who really
want to have whiz, bang,

lights and whistles, energetic experiences.

And that's what they're here for.

And that's what they're aiming toward.

And I was thinking about this the other day
because there's an American kundalini yoga teacher
who's not alive anymore named Swami Rudranada.

He was called Rudy for short.

And he had tremendous control over energy and
could create all kinds of phenomena around him.

But he was also tremendously compassionate.

If you read his writings and his teachings,
you can see that compassion was much more
important to him than all of these energetic

phenomenon that he was able to engage with.

When he died, there was this huge battle among
a few male students who other people
in that community called the shakti boys,

for good reason. Who was going to take over
and be the new reigning king of subtle energy.

Of kundalini. But none of them ever talk about
compassion. Like all they talk about is their
engagement with energy. This is such a waste. Rudy

was actually a beautiful teacher of compassion. I
didn't study with him but just reading his
writings he's one of the people that taught me

what was actually important. But if we're not
looking for it we don't notice I guess.

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