Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Chidheads podcast. Today's episode is actually
extracted from one of the sessions of the thirty day Sadana that I have been
teaching for embodied philosophy. In this thirty day Sodena, we are exploring a
particular text called the Mattiendra Sanghita, which is an early text associated with hate
yoga that also has a very interesting practice associated with the chakras and the Yoganese
that are associated with them. Initially, I had planned to just speak for
about ten to fifteen minutes and then practice every day for the thirty days of
this sodena, but it's actually turned out to be about an hour. Every
day, I spend about thirty minutes unpacking a particular concept. I explore some
philosophical material that helps to contextualize the text historically and soophically, and to explore
some of the worldview associated with the text, and we also of course explore
various translations of different passages from the text itself. One of the core concepts
that will perhaps be familiar to many of your listeners is this concept of baba,
the Sanskrit word bava. This concept of bava is connected to a theory
of imagination that helps us to make sense of and contextualize the practices of visualization
that are illustrated throughout the text. So on one particular day, I explore
this concept of bava from which we get familiar words like bavana, and so
I thought i'd share it with you before we transition into it. A couple
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iTunes. So, without any further ado, let's go ahead and get right
into the episode. Thanks for listening. Hello everyone, good afternoon, good
morning, good evening, wherever you happen to be in the world, Welcome
back to day four of the thirty day Sodana, exploring the Chekas and the
Yoganese from a particular text, as you know by now, the Matsienda Sanhita.
So today I wanted to unpack an important kind of theoretical concept or what
we could even describe it as the theory of the practice at the basis of
the Matsianda Sanhita or the many different practices that we find in this text.
There is a as I had mentioned I think in one of the earlier sessions,
there's this theory of imagination that is really central not only to this text,
but also to really the entire con tric tradition and yoga tradition. And
it's when we really engage with it, it's quite a radical idea and really
pushes back quite a bit against kind of our cultural presuppositions about you know,
what the role of the imagination is and and how it plays into reality itself,
and and the the creation, the radical creativity of our lives. So
this, this term which you're probably very familiar with if you are not new
to the yoga tradition, is this term bava, This sanscrit word bava.
Now, bava actually has a lot of different uh meanings. It means being
becoming. Uh. It has this sense of of a state of things you
might have. If you're familiar with the with the vision of a tradition,
of the Baku tradition, you often hear people say, I, you know,
I'm in the bav right, I'm in the mood. In other words,
So bava this word of of mood or kind of disposition. It means
a state of being but also a state of becoming. And we find it
in words like pavana, which maybe some of you are familiar with. This
term means well, it's often translated, in my view, somewhat problematically as
as meditation, because of course, what do we mean my meditation here?
But bavana is really better translated, particularly in the context of many facets of
the tonic tradition as creative contemplation or a kiss defines it as empathic imagination.
And so you know, what does this have to do with our practices?
Right? This is a just a bit from one of the articles by this
very celebrated scholar Alexa Sanderson. Perhaps some of you've heard of him, and
I think he captures really beautifully here what kind of what bavana is really all
about, or this term bava and its role and meaning in the context of
contric practice. The thinking which the theorists of the Sedanta, right, Sadanta,
the Shivsedanta is sort of the earliest form of Shaivism, or at least,
you know, the most organized form of Shivism, because we could say
there was proto Shivism all the way back to the Vedas in the form of
Rudra. But the Shivsdanta is kind of the dualistic Shiva tradition that pre was
the precursor to the more esoteric and nondual traditions that were oriented around the goddess.
So, reading this again, the thinking which the theorist of the Sedanta
had in mind was not the cognition of a fact, but a kind of
mental work which produces a result through effort. It is seen as imagination with
the power to cross from the imaginary calpunicam to the real satiam, so transcending
the dichotomy between these domains which marks the world on which ritual works. Ritual
being kind of a particularly important in the Sedanta, but also it's it becomes
more internalized within the more esoteric meditative traditions of nondual tantra, which, of
course, you know, when we're doing our visualization, we are doing a
form of internal ritual, right And in the earlier dualistic traditions it was more
ritual was performed externally primarily in a very similar way. You know, that's
analogous to kind of the Vedic berminical tradition of performing these various sacrifices and rituals
of honoring the various deity forms. But and it's not that the nondual esoteric
practitioners didn't participate in external rituals. It's just that they would have also been
performing these internal rituals through meditation, and from the perspective of their philosophy and
cosmology, this was actually a more important part of it, and in some
sense the external ritual was sort of in some and superfluous, even though they
might perform it almost at a cultural level, right, it was sort of
necessary to keep to stay rooted in the cultural milieu, at least according to
the Tontracas. Anyway, that's another topic. So getting back to this,
it is certainly the case that the effect, namely shivenous is made present in
the mind of the ritual agent. But this is not because his ritual has
become cognition of a fact, in this instance, recognition of self, but
rather because it is the nature of tonic ritual to realize in this way what
is desired and not yet existent. So this is really fascinating and I think,
you know, when we really kind of wrestle with it a little bit,
it implies something quite radical, which is that, you know, when
we are performing Bob, and we're performing ritual, it is not that we
are even necessarily relating to a pre existing end. Is that through the power
of our imagination, which is this divine faculty that we have that was you
know, given by offered by the fabric of reality of itself, which is
our true nature, that that this power of imagination actually has the capacity to
bring into being the deity, as you know, in in identification with ourselves.
So you know, if, for example, we are skeptical about you
know, well, is this a real quality? Is this a real thing?
It's almost beside the point according to this theory, because what we are,
what we are doing, is actually attempting to cultivate a state of divinity
that didn't exist before. So so in a sense, it's sort of irrelevant
whether or not these deity forms are existing independent of us. The idea is
that we are calling them into being, we're actually creating them. So this
idea almost that that God is not yet here in some way or use whatever
substitute for the divine you like, and that God is yet to come through
the cultivation and create and creative capacity of our practice, which I think is
just a really I feel like you don't find this in many other places besides
the hundred traditions, really quite fascinating. So this is from the Jana bay
of Aa Tantra, my translation of verse twenty. So it's Shatiya Vasta Pravishtasia
ne Vi Baghena Bavana Tadasa Shivarupi sat Shaivi mukam i when of the one who
has entered pravishtasia, the state of a sta of shakhti through empathic imagination.
So I'm using the translation of kiss here of bavana, or you could replace
it with creative contemplation if you like. But really not just a kind of
empty meditation, but really a very active, visual, imaginative meditation. Here
is what we're talking about. Such a one has has an understanding of reality.
So what does that mean? So by virtue of harnessing the power of
one's imagination, we also at the same time our understanding reality in a particular
way without distinction. One would then be in that state of the form of
Shiva. So in this state of a radical, liberated creativity capable of bringing
into being a state of being that is divine, is just to be in
a state that is the form of Shiva. And it is declared in the
Agamas that this is the door right, our creative contemplation, our bavana practice
is the door of Shiva or the divine or that state of yoga that we
are seeking to accomplish through practice. It really in some sense, you know,
I got an email and this always happens a little bit, and that
I sometimes when I start teaching, I often start with really trying to discuss
the difference in deity, what deity means in these traditions. Of course,
there are a whole whole host of a range of styles of relationship with what
deity is, and for some people are very kind of maybe traditional is the
wrong word, but an understanding of it is a real being and the personified
expressions of it. That's how it looks like, and it's out there,
and I'm going to relate to it. But you know, and I mean
even to some degree. Also, Western religious traditions also have much more esoteric,
mystical understandings of what the divine is that often gets lost in kind of
the rigid forms of religion that get you know, passed down to us and
and kind of dominate our cultural environment. But the conceptions of deity here are
much more subtle and radical. It's really about almost like a pragmatic These are
pragmatic tools, and this is a kind of sense of deity. That is
you find in both Hindu Tantra and Tibetan Tantra Tibetan Buddhism that these are visualization
tools that are capable of channeling and facilitating the comp puishment of certain states and
the ability of us to cultivate these states. So we are using they are
devices, they are real in a sort of qualitative sense, but they are
also, in a sense already aspects of who we are. But because we
don't have any symbols or you know, knowledge systems to help us connect to
these latent faculties that we have within us, the contract traditions are offering us
essentially tools for us to essentially awaken dormant faculties and capacities that already pre exist.
You know, you could think about it even in terms of you know,
neurochemistry this and I obviously know nothing about brain science, but you know,
there's this common right thing that people will point to about how we only
use a certain portion of our brain and like there's this huge swath of the
brain that's not active and blah blah blah. And then of course there's also
the evidence showing how in certain meditative states contemplative states, scientists neuroscientists are seeing
who are willing to actually explain this, all sorts of other areas of the
brain light up that's another sort of topic for another day. But you can
think about it in terms of, like, you know that that there are
these essentially, you know, there's a corresponding brain state for all these faculties
and dispositions and ways of seeing, ways of perceiving our reality that are not
yet available to us. And it's the question is, well, why,
And one answer to that is that our cultural conditioning just does not have a
place for any of these things. Right when we look back anthropologically at other
traditions, including the Sanskrit tradition, Yoga tradition, there's so many things we
read that don't make any sense to us because we don't have the cultural lexicon
to find kind of analogous understandings and and and that doesn't necessarily mean that we
can't at some point understand it in some visceral way. So we draw on
our contemplative practices in a sense, to cultivate these the possibility of these states
in our lives, and the traditions of philosophical inquiry, the knowledge systems,
the texts themselves, these are profoundly important because they essentially open up our imagination
to possibilities that we don't even know are there, right, And also they
allow us to see the way in which our own cultural conditioning is in some
sense just a kind of arbitrary expression, historically contingent expression of the possibilities of
human imagination. Right, And so we're quite radical in that way Antinomian in
pushing back and saying no, the imagination. Imagination isn't just something in the
realm of fantasy. It's not just something for kids or artists. It is
active in everything that we do, whether we recognize it or not. And
actually, in a lot of ways, the cultural imagination is what dominates our
imagination. And you know, one of the things that perhaps we could say
happens from childhood into adulthood is the kind of liver pready, the freedom,
the playfulness of imagination gets sort of, you know, muscled down by by
all of these cultural forces that essentially domesticate our imagination. So yeah, so
anyway, that's bava. So let's go ahead and practice, shall we.