I'm Jacob Kyle, and this is chittheads asutomus. In our culture, we
take certain forms of objective scientific knowledge to be the only kind of knowledge that
is valid, and this, of course then silences all these different other modes
of knowledge, including somatic, contemplative, spiritual, and all the rest of
it. You can study the peach, we can have a very beautiful discursive
explanation of the peach, but unless we've actually sunk our teeth into it,
we are not going to know the peach. And so I think analogous lead
to that with contemplative traditions, that we run the risk of not making use
enough of the contempt of strategies and technologies themselves that will give us a taste
of the peach, and instead we often in some spiritual circles today I think,
get overly wrapped up in just talking about the peach. Let's see the
yoga traditions, as far as I see them, are about the unique synthesis
of paradox. Coming back to Western culture, we have this idea of non
contradiction. We don't think that something should contain a contradiction in order to be
valid, as like a proposition right, as a form of knowledge, but
in the Indian tradition, paradox is pervasive. But I think that there is
a beauty in thinking of the non object, that is consciousness, that is
the foundation of being as something profoundly paradoxical. Shunty shanty shanty. Hello everyone,
and welcome back to the Chidheads podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Kyle.
Today is a particularly special episode for me because, by contrast to how
this podcast usually goes, where I'm interviewing other people, in this episode,
I'm actually the one being interviewed. I was very honored and delighted to be
invited by Kelly Blazer to participate in this year's Power of Meditation Summit. Kelly
has been organizing and hosting this summit for I believe it's seven years now,
and this year she invited me to participate and to do this interview with her.
So I had a really wonderful time talking with Kelly about the concept of
the scholar practitioner, the importance of the synergy of knowledge and experience, and
also I spoke to her a little bit about my own personal experience as a
gay man and a queer person. I spoke a lot about queer spirituality in
an article that I wrote for Tarka a couple of years ago now, which
is called God is Queer, and you can find that in the on Queer
Dharma issue of Tarka, which is at Tarca Journal dot com. As so
often happens with things like this, I listened to the interview again and I
feel like there are certain places where I could have said something a little bit
differently, or I could have added a bit to kind of deepen a sense
of understanding of what I was talking about. So there are just two things
that I wanted to mention before we segue into today's interview. Kelly spoke to
me about the concept of zero, and this came up because Tarka was initially
published with issue one, which was on boc dye, and then we did
issue an issue on illusion and an issue on ecology, and then we went
back and we published an issue zero, which was on the Scholar Practitioner,
And in the introduction to that issue, I spoke about the history of zero
and the fact that zero wasn't a concept that we always had. It actually
was not a part of mathematical systems until a particularly late date. And then
when it was adopted into mathematical systems, when it was quote unquote discovered,
but also in a sense created, right, because zero is in a sense
nothingness. It is the null point. It is the absence of something,
and yet it made the possibility of new forms of knowledge possible. So out
of nothing came something. When I spoke to her about this concept of zero,
I was really pointing to the way I was harnessing it as a metaphor
to point to that which cannot be expressed, that which cannot be designated,
that which is silent, or that which is beyond conceptualization. But this is
only part of the story. She mentioned that I called the meditation cushion a
seat of heresy. Right. A heretic is someone who has rejected doctrine,
has rejected dogma. And when we sit in meditation, even if we have
cultivated a certain knowledge around that, we put ourselves at the feet of that
upsurge of creativity and aliveness, that is our true nature, which is ultimately
the source of all concepts, and also beyond any conceptual articulation whatsoever. The
tradition of Indian philosophy, and something I wrote about in my recent m phil
thesis is this concept of pratipa pratiba is found throughout the Indian philosophical tradition,
and it is pointing to this function of radical creativity or inspiration or illuminative insight
that is a part of the fabric of reality itself. Reality is in some
sense this upsurge, this arising of creativity within us. So zero in the
way that I'm using it here metaphorically, is simultaneously that place, that experiential
silence within which all existing knowledge systems dissolve. But it is also that place
from within which new forms of affirmation, radical creativity, inspirations for new forms
of life, new politics, new ways of organizing ourselves socially, new ideas
about spirituality. All of that arises from this place of zero. Another thing
that I wanted to mention has to do with the topic of my article,
God is Queer. Now. In this article, I'm saying a number of
things and the idea of God. Here, I am not attaching to any
particular religion or system, although I do make arguments that are connected to the
Shaivishakta Darshana. While many would say, why don't we just use the word
divine or nature or some other you know, synonym that can stand in as
a substitute for the word God, because the word God has become so rife
with feelings of it being associated with, you know, white man in the
clouds raining down judgment upon us. But I say in the article that we
would do well to reappropriate God from the haters and the bullies who have turned
God into something that is a judgmental overlord, and that there is something healing
about that process, especially for those of us who maybe grew up in certain
forms of organized religion and then had a sense that we were rejected from that
tradition, either because we were gay or because we just didn't fit in within
the kind of fundamentalist architecture of what was being sold to us. But to
say God is queer, I'm not saying that God is a member of the
LGBTQ community. Although God is a member of every community right because God is
the source of all community in my opinion, and the source of literally everything,
every expression of life. But I meet it in two senses. One
is a kind of metaphysical sense. The term queer, before it became a
kind of label that people identified with, it was actually a theoretical concept that,
when found in queer theory, that pointed to the failure of all labels
to capture and express our full identity. Right. It pointed out the way
in which all of these different kinds of identities, these these dualities of man
and woman, these gendered binaries, how they break down in the lived experience
of a queer person. And so the term queer pointed to a kind of
radical openness that was always resistant toward the ways in which identity labels are essentially
used to constrain and limit our capacity for experience. God is queer in that
sense because God is beyond all binaries. God is non binary. God is
non dual. Right, God is transcends all of these ways in which language
splits things into subject and object, into different forms of polarity, different binaries.
In that sense, God is extremely queer. But from a kind of
polemical perspective. In that article, I was also trying to argue for new
forms of queer constructive theologies. Right, because the theologies, the organized religions,
and even to some sense modern spiritual communities are narrated in such a way
that queer people are often not included, or rather the forms of queer embodiment
that many people are experiencing don't have a kind of theoretical or theological home or
philosophical home within which that experience can make sense. And I think here that
we have work to do. We want simultaneously honor the traditions and understand them
at their word, but also feel empowered to create new vocabularies, to resituate
our understanding of different forms of iconography, to reconceptualize certain philosophical vocabularies in a
way that empowers us to connect with our own spiritual path as queer people.
So, without any further ado, I will hand things over to Kelly.
I really hope you enjoy this interview. I would love to hear your thoughts
about it. Please send me an email at Chittheads at Embodied Philosophy dot com
and I will definitely send you a response. I love hearing people's experiences and
insights as they pertain to the conversations that I have on the Chitthheads podcast,
and so I hope you'll reach out to me if you feel called to.
Please also note that we have recently become a YouTube channel. Chittheads now has
its own YouTube channel, So please do subscribe to the Chittheads podcast on YouTube
so that we can begin to grow that. I'm going to be putting more
episodes up there. I'm doing a little bit more work trying to record these
episodes in a more highly produced way, using different camera angles, using better
audio equipment. So I'm using YouTube as a place to place all these and
also to share some other inspiration and educational resources. So please do follow us
on YouTube if you haven't already. I will hand things over to Kelly and
thanks so much for being a Chitheads listener. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Hello, and welcome back to the Power of Meditation Summit and I'm here
with Jacob Kyle, founder of Embody Philosophy. Such a treat to get to
be with you. Thanks for coming, Jacob, Thank you so much for
having me Kelly, It's a pleasure. Yeah. So, Embody Philosophy is
a platform that's just full of magic, and so I hope people will go
to embodyphilosophy dot com and just check it out. And we do have a
pretty amazing gift which I'll talk about a little bit later, but a really
nice discount for folks that want to play inside your platform. But let me
tell them a little bit about you. So, Jacob Kyle's meditation teacher,
writer, philosophy, educator, and the founding director of Embody Philosophy. He
holds a master's in philosophy and Classical Indian Religions from Oxford, a master's in
philosophy from the New School for Social Research, and a master's in science in
political theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jacob is a
student of Kashmir Shaivism, scholar practitioner Paul Muller Ortega, and is a devoted
practitioner of the Shaivashakta Darshana. So we can talk, we can kind of
contextualize that for folks that don't really know what that means, and we have
a lot to kind of dive into here today. I spent a lot of
time with the Tarka issues from the Tarka Journal, and so I would really
want to encourage people to pay attention to that as well. But maybe you
can give us kind of a little bit of an like, just well,
let me see if I can frame this properly. So you talk about the
fact that after you had already published a few issues of the Tarka Journal,
you kind of like rewound and published another one and you called it zero,
And there's something pretty profound about that, and maybe you could use that as
kind of a jumping off place to what happens inside the Shaiva Shakka tradition that's
distinct maybe from other traditions that people are used to. Well, the zero
issue, as you said, was it was a retro actively a retrospectively however
you want to look at it. A published issue of the Tarka Journal.
We had published I believe three issues by that point, and when we were
developing that issue, what I wanted to do was to really kind of make
essentially set the foundation for what we were doing with the entire Tarka project.
And I I don't think it's exclusively what we're doing in the Embodied Philosophy project,
but it's certainly a key part of it, which is developing and creating
space for this notion and this perspective of the scholar practitioner. And by that
I mean quite simply in the article, in one of the articles that I
had sent to you, it's essentially a scholar who practices and when we think
about scholarship today, there is a pretense toward objectivity, right, and we
have this value of objectivity that's very dominant in Western culture and generally speaking in
academic circles at least if we think about them quote unquote traditionally meaning you know,
over the last couple of centuries that has tended to denigrate subjective experience.
Well, given the fact that contemplative traditions like Shaivishakta tantra are you know,
built around sequences of sodena and meditative practice and various practices of ritual if we
bracket out subjectivity as a valid means of knowledge, subjective knowledge as a valid
means of knowledge, then we essentially have missed the point of these contemplative traditions.
And so I you know, when I started embodied philosophy, I think
the scholar practitioner impulse was there in the sense that I created it because I
wanted to have a place where people could study more deeply yoga philosophy, and
that it was important to study it deeply and understand the textual traditions, understand
the philosophical concepts because what I was seeing at that time, which is now
back in twenty fifteen, what I observed, just at least in my own
circles, was a really kind of fluffy distillation of yoga philosophy. You know,
there was sort of a fluffy idea around the Yoga Sutras, and in
fact, the Yoga Sutras was I mean very kind of I would say,
narrowly understood, and certain parts of the book were just completely left out of
consideration because we didn't really have a context to understand it. And so I
think if more practitioners were where I thought at the time, if more practitioners
were exposed to a deeper study of the text, a deeper study of the
tradition, not in a purely scholarly way, but in a deep and in
a way with integrity and depth and vigor or rigor, that they would that
their practice would become would feel more supported and more inspired and more empowered.
So on the one hand, I was kind of responding to this sort of
fluffy yoga philosophy I experienced in the yoga in yoga schools and yoga studios.
And then on the other hand, I felt like scholarship was completely inaccessible to
most yoga practitioners. So the platform really was a way of bridging the two.
It also reflected my own kind of experience in being a yoga practitioner but
also being kind of studying philosophy and being passionate about philosophy, and so that
combination and exploring the tension between them and also the possibility of them complementing and
supporting one another is something that I just feel is a really important mode of
investigation. And I think lots of different people have ideas of what the scholar
practitioner means, and that's fine, everybody can have. I mean, even
in the scholar practitioner issue itself, the issue zero, I feel like there
was a lot of different kind of angles to unpacking this idea of the scholar
practitioner. But to me, you know, it really means employing the what
I call embodied epistemaies. Essentially, embodied methods in epistemology is just this fancy
philosophy word for the science of knowledge and what we take to be knowledge.
And to go back to the point about objectivity. In our culture, we
take certain forms of objective scientific knowledge to be the only kind of knowledge that
is valid, and this, of course then silences all these different other modes
of knowledge, including somatic, contemplative, spiritual, and all the rest of
it. And I don't think that these two are mutually exclusive. I think
we just have to as a culture, you know, especially in the scholarly
community, we have to see the limits of our own cultural epistemology so that
we can begin to engage these contemplative traditions in the spirit of openness, almost
like a scientist, like we are. We are open to the experiments of
contemplative sodena and see what happens, See how it transforms our body mind,
see how it transmutes our nervous system. And then on the yoga side,
we also have to get past this what I think is a kind of anti
intellectual obstacle that is at least pervasive in the United States and my experience that
all we need to do is practice. And I don't think that that is
at all true both experientially, that all we need is that, because right,
if we don't have a context of knowledge to situate and make sense of
our experience, then oftentimes we explain our experience in terms of the cultural conditioning
that we've had, right, And that's just a form of limitation, and
so and so you know, in the yoga community you hear a lot about
you know, I think it's one percent theory in ninety nine percent practice.
I don't know who said this, maybe Petabi Joyce, but I think that
that is really a kind of myth and it's a little bit problematic, and
it's certainly not representative of the traditions themselves, especially the Shaivishoktra tradition, as
you wanted me to talk about, because the Shaivishoktra tradition is you know,
through and through permeated by very deep philosophical inquiry as well as these really sophisticated
modes of contemplative sodona that are meant to give one an experience of that knowledge
that is otherwise being studied. Yeah, brilliant. I mean, I don't
know that much about the Tantrasara, but I was reading it a little bit
recently, and there's a big emphasis in Avagupta's writings on like the importance of
studying, studying scripture, studying the philosophy itself. I just want to read
a little bit of what you wrote in that audition in zero, So you
wrote zero is synonymous with void nothingness and entails infinity. The emergence of zero
led to philosophical and mathematical implications that not all cultures were ready or willing to
accept. When it was accepted, it overturned a restitilian philosophy, subverted the
existing mathematical logic, and provoked a dismantling of the geocentric worldview. So you
know, you go on to really like talk about what that meant and what
it means to what it meant at that time to for something first of all,
like just so kind of blank at a blanket level, heretical. I
think at one point you say, like the seat of the meditator or the
meditation cushion is a place of heresy. So that willingness to dismantle what is
is clearly like a part of the scholar practitioner's role. And also I see
in this kind of this movement from geocentric to heliocentric worldview is in a sense
is like this metaphor from an orientation to the world that's really kind of self
centric, like egocentric, to more centered in the In the wholeness and my
understanding of the Shaiva Shakta philosophy in general, there's a huge, huge amount
of this, like, you know, there's no real dividing line between Kelly
and Jacob. Like the dividing line is more like between what is real and
what is unreal, like what is true? What is consciousness and then what
is the the veil that is sometimes within consciousness. Anyway, before I go
on and on on that, didn't he just any thoughts on that? Yeah,
you know, it's interesting the concept of zero and the reason I was
sort of bringing it up playfully and kind of metaphorically in a way to to
really express essentially what cannot be designated. Right, So the zero is,
you know, we have any at any point we enumerate, we are counting
things that are existing in the world, and the zero points to the null
place, the place of emptiness, which could also be seen as fullness depending
on right emptiness in the Buddhist tradition, fullness in the Vedante or the Shaivashakta
tradition. But they're both getting at the same thing, which is this experiential
place beyond concepts that in my view, contemplative traditions and really all spiritual traditions
are in some sense building their architectures around. So as soon as we start
to enumerate anything, is the zero is always implied. And yet we forget
about the zero, right, We become obsessed with certain forms of identification,
right, and so we number ourselves in various ways. And yet the zero
is the silence within that is giving rise to the inspiration of all esoteric and
spiritual modalities. And so I think my kind of metaphorical point in bringing zero
into that conversation with just saying, let's attend to that as a worthy field
of our practitioners study. Let's not forget that we can't actually touch zero with
our intellectual discursive methods, right, we can't. Even we can talk about
it as we're doing. We can poetically transcribe it in a way, but
ultimately we need to touch that place experience experientially within ourselves. And contemplative traditions
are giving us the tools to actually experience zero. Right. And so I
think that there's you know, I brought it up in the in the the
Scholar Practitioner article about the of studying of a peach. Right, you can
study the peach, you can know the scientific I'm not a scientist, so
I'll have trouble articulating this in scientific terms. But we can have a very
beautiful discursive explanation of the peach, but unless we've actually sunk our teeth into
it, we are not going to know the peach. And so I think
analogously to that in with contemplative traditions, that we run the risk of not
constructing and making use enough of the contemplative you know, the contemplative strategies and
technologies themselves that will give us a taste of the peach, and instead we
often in some spiritual circles today I think, get overly wrapped up in just
talking about the peach. Right, So that's I think that's kind of that's
I don't know if I answered your question, but that's sort of how I
would try to get you know, what the point of the zero was.
That it's a it's a metaphor for the experience of contemplative fulfillment that then gets
enumerated in many different types of ways by different traditions. Beautiful. Yeah,
there's incredible depth actually just in this conversation about what like, what is what
is it to be a scholar practitioner? What is it to let your own
subjective experience be the deepest ground, like the most important laboratory. But how
do we do that without rejecting what's core in the tradition? Another interesting quote
here, Hold on a second, let me see if I can find it.
Well, let me just read this. This is actually a lot about
what you just said. But to be a scholar practitioner then is precisely to
straddle domains of the object and the non object. Surely it must not neglect
that which has been revealed the knowledge and history of yoga, but it must
simultaneously seek the revealing power that is encountered as a priori throughout the yogic process.
So talk to us a little bit about the revealing power and maybe how
that gets positioned inside the teachings of the naturage. Perhaps if you like,
yeah, sure, well you're reading from the article Yoga Apologia, which I
really in that. When I had read, I was reading a lot of
phenomenologists at the time, and I was being extremely playful with my style,
and I felt like I was really experimenting. But I was really trying to
and I'm sure it seemed a little obtuse to some folks who are reading it,
but I was really trying to capture in that, you know, in
that passage that you mentioned, this idea that you know, the the object,
of course is is any object, and it can be a conceptual object,
it can be an object in the world. And when we're talking about
I think in that passage, I was just very recently talking about maybe kaivoly
Ya Samadi, these sorts of concepts, and without the concepts, right,
we don't actually perceive them as a possibility. But without actually having the concept
initially, we don't really have a sort of horizon through which, you know,
between ourselves and the end of that horizon within which something can be revealed,
like of you know, an experience of some sort of form of awakening
or contemplative fulfillment. I won't put too you know, definitive a point on
it, but there's many, of course ways of thinking about that sort of
subtle opening, subtle revealing that happens through the process of meditation or a contemplative
sodden and more generally. But we need But at the end of the day,
kaivala is not an objective state. It is not an object, right.
It is actually the condition of having no objects within consciousness. So that's
why it's often translated as a loneness or isolation, which is a little bit
of a clunky term because when we think of alone, being alone or being
you know, in isolation, the very way in which we perceive that or
think about that concept is that we are alone, but everything else is happening
around us. But that and of itself is already a picture that is permeated
with objective perception, right, objects, you know, isolated in space apart
from each other. But a Kivolya is actually saying that there's an experience of
consciousness that is prior to any objectivation at all. So even so Kivolya is
not like when I am sitting in meditation, I'm like Kivolya, it's here,
there, it is, But rather we only know it occurred, right,
We only know somebody happened, well, some forms of somebody, because
they're smoty with objects and without objects of thought. But these states are often
only known almost either because of the cumulative effects that they incur upon our life.
Or we realized we were there because you know, we sat down and
then the alarm, the meditation alarm went off, and it was like no
time had passed, right, because you were in a state without any objects,
and so there was no thinking as well. And so the the the
if we don't have the the words for these experiences, we don't know that
they're possible. And and so I think words like Kivolya and Samadi, amongst
many many others are essentially pointing to with the object of a concept, they're
pointing to an experience, but ultimately the experience isn't in that concept itself,
right, we actually have to then sit down and do the sod and a
follow the you know, the the practice technology, whatever it is we're doing.
And then and then later retroactively we might think, ah, I feel
that that might have constituted a Samadi state or that would have been an experience
of kai volume because I was nowhere where was I right? So again,
I'm not sure if I answered your question, but it took me. It's
very paradoxical, I find because there's this there's this sense. Christopher Wallison I
talked about this as well, and this is part of what's in his most
recent book, you know, like having a path to awakening or understanding of
what awakening is, what kaivalia is, which I've always heard kind of translated
by as liberation. But with this kind of a loneeness, kind of isolation
from the dross of the material world, sort of components, so very classical
yoga kind of lens. But so this idea that there is a possible,
the possibility of liberation. Without that, without being exposed to that idea,
we would never maybe know to seek it. And yet we the mind gets
so hooked on an idea of a thing, like a concept of a thing,
that then it becomes impossible to that away in order to experience what we're
actually experiencing. So it feels like there's a paradox there. Oh, absolutely,
I think. I think probably those of us who have done adventures of
Sodona for some sustain period of time have probably experienced these states. And yet
because we have maybe made them so mystical or so esoteric that we actually don't
even realize, right, we don't recognize protibution now, we don't recognize the
state for what it is because we're so attached to some idea we have about
it. And usually I think that idea is associated with a really transcendent notion
of what spiritual experience is supposed to be like. And you're right, You're
absolutely right. I think it's it is paradoxical. And and but the you
know, the the yoga traditions, as far as I see them, are
about the unique synthesis paradox that actually, you know, we again, like
coming back to Western culture, we have this idea of non contradiction. We
don't think that something should contain a contradiction in order to be valid as like
a proposition, right, as a form of knowledge. But in the Indian
tradition, paradox is pervasive, right, And so in a certain way,
the experience of paradox is sort of getting at the truth of it. So,
so acknowledging it as a paradox might it could either send us running in
the other direction or think that it's wrong. And I think that's where our
conditioned way of thinking about these things affects our relationship with it, because we
think it's supposed to completely cohere. Now that's not to say that there are
certain contradictions that we shouldn't work out philosophically for ourselves. But I think that
there is a beauty in thinking of the non object that is consciousness, that
is the foundation of being as something profoundly paradoxical. M Yeah, I mean,
and certainly if all arising is from this kind of floor, you can't
really call it a floor because it doesn't have any substance but consciousness itself,
and there infinite low side of consciousness. If we have any kind of a
glimpse into what consciousness is, we invariably are going to perceive the infinitude of
those different perspectives on consciousness. So it's going to feel a little bit like
we're going crazy, perhaps, even though that might be an insight into what
really is. So yeah, there's a lot there. I want to take
us back to the idea of the revealing power because I feel like just this
the kind of the the phase of revelation, even inside this the teachings on
the five acts kind of you know, elucid, it's what the other acts
are in a sense. And I wonder if you might just be yes,
sure, So I feel like you want me to talk a little bit about
the the symbolic symbolic depiction of Naraja, right so Notaj, as we know,
is the dancing form of Shiva, and he beautifully reflects the non duality
of consciousness in in this morti right in this, in this statue, in
this image and so you have a statue of Nataraja behind you, and there
are, yes, there are four arms right and and two feet and in
let's see if I can remember where they're situated. But in one hand he
has the damaru drum right, which is the essentially the the drum of creation.
And then he has a hand that is in a biomudra, which means
fear not. And then he has this another hand that's holding a flame.
And uh, those three those three hands, the elements that he's holding are
representative of the creation, the sustainment, and the dissolution, which is this
kind of arc of reality that is happening all the time. Right at every
given moment, something is coming into being, something is being sustained for some
time, and then something is is passing away and then and you know,
we can think about this just in the arc of life, but it happens,
you know, at a daily level, it happens at a second level,
that happens at a minute level. And then there are two other kind
of symbolic depictions, and one is well, they're actually well, depending on
how you look at it, other three or four more. But there is
the foot that is the hand. Excuse me the hand that is turned down
with the palm facing away, and this is representative of the concealing of reality,
right, the act that we are hiding from ourselves act you know,
in a in a way that we at the absolute level have actually chosen to
do. Right, we've made the decision or rather, you know, not
our individual egoic self has made that decision, but the great cosmic consciousness has
made the decision to conceal itself as our individuated identity. And then there and
then that hand very beautifully is pointing to an upraised foot, right, the
upraised foot that is, you know, the foot that's well, they're both
dancing, I suppose, but the upraised foot is the is. You know,
feed are very sacred in in the Indian tradition, and one is often
you know, prostrates when selves at the guru's feet. And also sometimes you'll
see on people's alters the sandals, right, because the sandals represent grace,
they represent essentially the anugraja shakti, right, which is the revealing function of
reality itself. So on one level, everything is in this kind of cosmic
dance of coming into being sustaining for a while and dissolving, and that's sort
of like this cyclical, recycled process. And then there is this other,
this dimension happening simultaneously, this dialectic of awakening and concealing, and you can
think about it as a game of heide and seek. In fact, that's
not an original idea that comes from Alan Watts. I believe was the first
place I heard that. And in this concealing and revealing dialectic of our lives
and of really cosmic reality itself. According to the Shaibashakta tradition, is the
dance of life, and it happens infinitely, I mean depends on who you
ask. Different teachers will say, well, you are ultimately looking to liberate
yourself from the cycles of smsara, and at some point you'll be in in
you know, you'll you'll be beyond that cycle. But from the nondual shaivashock
to perspective, it's a nondual tradition, there's nowhere else to go but here.
Everything is already here, because nothing is separate or different from what is
already here. And so in some sense, the awakening is to you know,
the awakening happens, the revealing happens, potentially in this very lifetime.
But I think it's also interesting to think about the fate, the sort of
subtle variations of this, and that it's not like you were suggesting before.
Actually I think it isn't. You know. Sometimes we get stuck on this
idea and it happens in you know, popular spirituality a lot that like there
is this state of enlightenment, like you know, I've interviewed a lot of
people for Chittheads, as you've interviewed a lot of people, and it shifted
a little bit. But I remember at the beginning, it seemed like every
spiritual teacher had this story of like their awakening, as if like it was
just one moment and then they were on that higher level and everybody else was
down here hoping that their you know, peak spiritual experience would happen. And
I think that's a really it's a really sort of it's not a non dual
perspective in my opinion, and it's a bit of a problematic view because it
suggests that again there's this hierarchy, and I think that that concealing revealing dance
happens in subtle ways throughout our lives, and actually we can become quite revealed,
like we can, like I can remember, you know, being in
states just sort of like in that interstitial space between waking and dreaming, right,
which is a is itself a kind of auspicious space in yoga traditions,
and sometimes you're there. I feel like it's a common experience. Sometimes you're
in that space and you just know, right, you're just in this feeling
of knowing or you understand something, and you as you're waking up, you
want to write it down because like, ah, I got it, I
got it, I got it. I don't know what I got, but
it's there and it's profound, and if I can just write it down.
And then as you become concealed into your own linguistic you know, identified position,
you lose it, right, It disappears, it falls back into the
ocean of consciousness. And so I feel like we do ourselves maybe a disservice
of thinking that they're revealing as a sort of linear trajectory upward, and that
actually these moments of realization and revelation are happening in subtle ways throughout our lives.
And that's another thing I think we could do, you know, we
could develop more of a language around talking about that and acknowledging that and affirming
those moments as really unique and special and auspicious. Yeah, I mean,
just that kind of rubbing together of concealment and revelation is incredible. I mean,
I've read something recently about how, like, you know, dream states
have been studied and like the process of what the mind is doing in the
dream state is exactly what is happening during the waking state, except in the
waking state we're constantly checking against what we can perceive in so called outer reality,
Like the doors of perception are in contact with the things of this world,
and that's providing a constant restraint on what the mind would otherwise be able
to do. And so, in a sense, like our waking life is
the concealment because we're you know, our consciousness is colored by contact with the
outer world, and therefore we you know, to quote Chameraja, I think
seventh Sutra of the Sutras on recognition something like we therefore, maybe it's not
the seventh ninth we wander diluted like as some Saudines, because we're in that
contact and it's an inevitable byproduct of consciousness. Coming into the world of form,
that there's constraint that occurs. But we think of the day as you
know, we think of the day as light and the night as concealment,
and in fact it's maybe the opposite. But nonetheless it feels like that I
totally hear what you're saying that it's you know, it's really a flawed paradigm
to think that there's some enlightenment experience and that we have somewhere to get.
I mean that the image of like the night sky is coming to mind,
like maybe it's just like having this sense of the profundity of the darkness that
is being the world and then it's kind of pierced through by moments of light.
Yeah, and also I think, you know, it feels like you're
touching on a beautiful point, which is that you know, when we the
morete is symbolic of the divine reality, which also you know includes a pasmata,
right, which is the demon of forgetting or the demon of ignorance,
who is underneath not toa daja's foot, and we think, well, you
know, he's trying to repress that, but really it's all part of the
mortis right. The ignorance is part of the morti. The the concealing and
the revealing, it's part of the morti. So when we think about the
entire morti as being a symbolic depiction of divine reality, then like you're saying,
the darkness, the concealing is also divine and so it's not that we're
looking to get. I mean, this is where the nondual traditions are extremely
different from the those dualistic traditions that think and I'm not and I don't think
I think Sometimes we say, oh, the Vedanta's I mean, there's lots
of misunderstandings. There's non duality is pervasive throughout a lot of different traditions,
and there's ways of reading you know, Vidonta in a way that's very aligned
with Shaivashakta Tantra and even classical yoga. But when we when nondualists want to
distinguish themselves from dualistic systems, they often point to some traditions of thought that
denigrate the body right and say that the body is essentially a you know,
meat tube of piss and shit, and we're just looking to get out of
it and beyond it and to purify ourselves into you know, live in some
alternate plane in our pure, you know, soul like state. And of
course the Shivish extradition isn't saying that, it's saying that, you know,
every individuated experience is itself at some level is a completely like equal expression of
the divine consciousness. And so it's our own ignorance that then projects onto our
experiences and our relationships with other people these ideas of hierarchy of well, I'm
more illuminated than you, and this person is so sad because there's living in
this hell rom and all that sort of thing that we that our egos tend
to project onto it. Mm hmm, yeah, I mean, just the
it is a very ambiguous place for a lot of people, and and you
know requires this kind of combination between some sort of surrender and then ongoing inquiry,
I think, because it's not to become like completely sort of morally vacuous
or you know, relativistic. And yet it's a it is a very different
tradition in that, you know, to speak to something we were talking about
before we hit record, you know, there's not a whole lot of like
moral like very identified moral code except for to recognize everything as self, which
is a pretty big moral code as it turns out. Yeah, Now,
I think it's a really important point you're raising, because I think that when
people hear that right, that everything is equally divine, then they they're looking
for a moral allege within which they can, you know, say that this
is wrong and that is wrong. And I think it's really my teacher Paul
often speaks about this, that we can't on some level. Yes, that
is true from an absolute perspective, but we are not perceiving the world from
the absolute perspective, right, We are not in a state of non dual
consciousness where we are experiencing ourselves simultaneously with everything that is in such a way
that we can really make sense of that. So we fall into contradiction and
we fall into misunderstanding and spiritual bypassing quite frankly, when we take that explanation
of reality as a moral justification, right, we actually because again it goes
back to this idea of just talking about these traditions and not actually engaging with
the spiritual technologies of which they are a part. And as we were saying,
you know, in that portion of our conversation, before we started the
interview, at least according to Abaavagupta, you know, who's one of the
thinkers that I study very closely, that ethical formation process happens as a result
of your sodena, and and so you become essentially or you have more insight
into the nature of morality, you have more of a you have more skillfulness
around moral decision making and ethical perspectives when you are engaged in that sequence of
sodena, and when you are actually you know, doing the work of cultivating
the nervous system such that you can understand things at a sort of more subtle
level, I guess, yeah, yeah, And and the you know,
the practice, the practices show us so much about like the mind's tendency to
defend and to kind of bolster the separate self and become something that we're not,
or protect our reputation or all of the like slippery things that that conditioned
mind does. And without sudden that it's very hard to you know, see
that stuff much less kind of cop to it the impact that it has on
your life, or recognize how a lot of what you would consider amoral activity
and others probably has similar roots to what you've experienced inside. Well, yeah,
now this takes us kind of toward a direction I wanted to go.
You know, one of the other articles that you sent me is called God
is Queer and yeah, and it's it's amazing. I'm going to read from
it again and then maybe I'll be able to explain why I feel like you
just linked me into it. Maybe I won't. We'll see. So you
said, let us now take steps to reappropriate the word God, which has
for too long haunted many queer people in the Judaeo Christian world as a dogmatic
overlord who looks down upon the promiscuous citizens of Sodom with rage and spite,
who at best hates the sin, not the sinner, when nearly every homo
alive knows that the two cannot be separated. Yes, God, for many
of us has been a hater and a bully, or at least an inspiration
for the many bullies and haters who have sculpted in the dark corners in hallways
of our lives. And you know, you go on, your writing is
so beautiful. I just I loved getting to kind of basket it for a
little while. But you talk about this in the way I've talked about how
a lot of people who've been harmed by you know, moralistic twist with twisted
moral codes, kind of moralistic traditions have been you know, particularly folks with
marginalized identities, but like almost anyone has been harmed in some way by the
way that these moralistic traditions are then foisted by the powers that be, YadA,
YadA. And you talk about the fact that sometimes a way to heal
that for folks is to move more toward atheism or you know, yeah,
just some sort of a rejection of the of the concept of God. And
you're you're suggesting that a reappropriation of God and a kind of understanding of the
queerness of God is maybe the more healing path. So if you could just
talk about that a little bit, it would be delighted. Yeah, not
a small topic for sure. Yeah. I loved the I felt I loved
the opportunity to write that article, and that issue was obviously very important to
me as someone who identifies as a gay man and a queer person. And
you know, I'll just speak a little bit to my personal experience. I
lost my faith in God at a certain age, and I can remember it
very viscerally. I used to have this image in my room. It was
like a picture of Jesus at the garden of Guestsemine on like the cross section
of a tree trunk. It was very specific. I think it was actually
a very popular image. I think I remember seeing it some other homes.
And I have no idea how this conversation I had with this mentor woman who
is like ten years older than me, who I did theater with, but
she told me something about ancient Greece, and I have no idea what it
was. I can't remember exactly, but it within the course of that conversation
I went from believing in God to not believing in God. And it was
I you know, I when I speak about it, which isn't actually very
often, it's it was like a dark night of the soul for me because
I felt completely unmoored from my from the ground of what I knew to be
real. And I remember sitting and looking at the Jesus in the garden of
the Gustemone and and just crying hysterically, you know, about like not having
any source of meaning ultimately, And you know, I've I think a lot
of what I've done with my life, and and and the Embody Flashy Project
really all and and my expirations of philosophy. It took me many years to
realize that. I think it's I've always been seeking God in in in the
way. I've always been looking for that substitute of meaningfulness that I lost at
that early age. Now, the reason I lost my faith in God was
because God was so narrowly defined. I say this in the article, like,
when God is so narrowly defined that it's possible to say one either believes
or not believes in God, then you are you've narrowly You've narrowly defined God
so much that that kind of dichotomy makes sense. But if, as the
Shaiva Shoktra traditions teach, God is everything, nothing and anything in between,
then it's a little bit more difficult to say one doesn't or does believe in
God, because both declarations are themselves already, according to the shaivashacta perspective,
already implying God in their very articulation, because to articulate anything is an expression
of God. So so if you know, we had a larger container to
under and even I mean even in the obviously it was a Christian experience that
I was having in that moment. But even in the Christian tradition, there
is a long theological debate about the nature of God. And even had I
been exposed to that, which maybe if I had gone to the pastor and
told him, you know, maybe he would have given me some of these
thinkers to explore. But really it came, I think on it came at
the time that I was also coming to grips with my own sexuality. And
I think implicitly, even though at the time I don't think I would have
put it this way, I was implicitly recognizing that I did not belong in
this church, right, I did not belong in that my experience and my
identity, as I was coming to know it, no longer had a home.
And then and and I think that that was very much wrapped up in
my own loss of faith in God. And so now I think of faith
very differently, and I think that God is obvious. I think that it's
you know, it's only when we are stuck in these really narrow ideas of
God that we that we that we lose the what is if we just pause
or engage in contemplative of soden long enough to feel it. You know,
we can experience God everywhere, but it isn't the white man living in the
clouds throwing thunderbolts of judgment down on all of us. Obviously. Now,
I think my larger purpose in that article, I mean, that's sort of
my own just speaking to my own experience. But you know, I often
feel like I'm in the minority. I mean, there's lots of gay people
practicing yoga, but in sort of the esoteric communities that study different esoteric wisdom
traditions, there are not a lot of queer people. They're not a lot
of gay people. And I think that's partly because, as I said in
the article, we have been I say that at the end, in a
very polemical way, that God was taken from us in the sense that,
you know, God was always used as a narrative force to judge and condemned
to hell gay people, LGBTQ people, queer people, and that this has
led to an understandable reaction in LGBTQ people to reject God and to essentially attach
to another God, or the God of science, one could say, or
at least, you know, different modes of understanding secular understanding that they think
are safe from the dogmatic perspectives that are you know, present in kind of
fundamentalist religions. But I think that there are all sorts of reasons that I
won't get into about why. I think the spiritual voice aid that is left
without the freedom and inspiration to explore God and what God means for us in
our lives outside of those dogmas is causing us a lot of suffering. And
I think, I think, and I think that this isn't just regarding LGBTQ
people. I think it's all secular people who, you know, we we
have this idea of what reality is that is that is framing and limiting our
sense of wonder and our sense of aliveness and our sense of amazement, you
know. I mean, we don't even have to have a God concept to
be amazed by the cosmos, right, and the magnitude and and the the
magnitude of it, and how just thinking wow, we don't actually know.
We don't have to actually have a limit concept for the universe. It could
it's for you know, from some perspectives, it's contracting. From some perspectives,
it's continuing to expand infinite. It may go on infinitely, and that
even of itself is a is just one tool that as secular thinkers we can
take and go to that place of wonder because it naturally invokes wonder. And
you know, at least the ancient Greeks thought that wonder was the source of
philosophy, right, and then the Indian tradition, you know, often suffering
is the source of philosophy. It's interesting to think about the dynamic of those
two, but yeah, it's I think we are all living in a time
when we need new spiritual solutions, and we're seeing the symptoms of not having
spiritual solutions that speak to our time outside of the dogmas of fundamentalist religions everywhere,
right, and the failure of particular ideologies to substitute that. You know,
that that that place that is reserved for the adventure of meaning and the
adventure of fulfillment. That is spirituality so beautiful. I feel like I could
go on and on, just I want to extract more of this beautiful wisdom
and curiosity, but we should probably let our guests go and have their lives.
But thank you so much for the immensity of your curiosity and your capacity
to hold paradox, and you kind of brought us back full circle in a
sense to this querying of what the infinite is, and we began with the
infinite and the nothingness and can come back to this place of like maybe you
know, for those that have felt like cut off in any way from traditions
that they can understand maybe this querying into the Shaivashakta tantra and give folks back
to that place of infinitude. So I want to let people know a little
bit about the free gift that you're offering. It's good stuff. So Embody
Philosophy, as I said, is an extraordinarily extensive platform basically a library of
continuing education. And you know, Jacob and I went pretty deep here and
esoteric, and I'm sure there's a lot of that, but also there's a
lot of content that's also just very grounded in the things that one wants to
know in a sense, like anyone who's a meditator, a yoga teacher who
just kind of wants the fundamentals. There's there are so many courses that you
can explore there. And the coupon code that we'll send to you all in
your email will give folks twenty five percent off of the monthly subscription to The
Wisdom School, So check it out and thank you Jacob, thank you so
much. You've just you've you've lifted up so many voices and just disseminated so
much goodness through that, through that platform and through your work so deep.
Thank you so much. Kelly, it's been such an honor to chat with
you today. Thank you all right, be well,