Speech at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, March 2008
The Edge of Indian Spirituality – The Oral Tradition of Naked Yogis
Magic happens anywhere worlds meet: at a crossroads, the seashore, graveyards, airports, hospitals, mountain tops, and temples. But those places where the Ordinary World meets the Extraordinary World require pilgrimage, whether internal or external. The act of making a pilgrimage is that of suspending oneself between worlds. Those locations to which one makes a pilgrimage, are called tirthas, crossing over places. They are spaces containing the meeting of worlds, and standing on those intersections, one may be at once in both worlds. Tirthas mark hidden entrances to the Extraordinary World.
They resemble a fold in the page, a hinge between the macro and the microcosms. A reflection of the inner journey onto the external world or a reflection of the heavens onto the Earth. Those who go on a pilgrimage become witnesses of mirrors.The main reason for pilgrimage is for darshan, The Beholding, and the resulting blessings. Darshan derives from drsh, ‘to see’, and is The Beholding, not ‘the looking’, as a tourist might do, but The Seeing. And, as the mirrors continue to reflect images deeper and deeper within, Analogy operates reflecting the macrocosm and the microcosm.
The World must benefit from his pilgrimage, so having had darshan, the pilgrim brings something back to his village. Pilgrims return with more than memories, something auspicious, that brings magic and prosperity home.
Pilgrimage is also story, each pilgrim a hero, and every hero has a quest. That quest may take the pilgrim outside the realm of society and into the extraordinary world, where the rules have all changed. And it is here that the pilgrim connects with … the stars.
The pilgrim reflects a story on the surface of the Earth that is told in the night sky and connects with its great chain of resemblances and its reflections. It means achieving a body-less state, a kind of immortality – becoming a ghost, as the pilgrim’s spirit may be absorbed knowingly or unknowingly by so many other humans over time. And those humans may lend hands and tongues to that spirit.
I feel extremely honoured, pleased, and humbled to be here speaking to you this evening. The presence of so many great thinkers, magi, shamans, and alchemists here in Basel, sharing their very considerable experience, knowledge, and commentary with us, makes me feel the Spirit of the Earth, Herself, Her eternal Renewal and Her blessings. And it’s exciting for me to have an audience like you, from all over the planet, here to explore our consciousness, and take this experience back into the world.
The organizers of this incredible conference deserve the highest praise, and I want to thank you all, especially Lucius Werthmüller and Dieter Hagenbach… but most of all, Dr. Albert Hoffman, a truly great man, who by his dedication and work, by his mastery of his art, made it possible for many of us to acquire greater knowledge of ourselves and the world, and to have access to the extraordinary worlds many of us have spent our lives exploring. To me, he is a living deity.
Dr. Hoffman is the greatest living alchemist, and perhaps the greatest for a very long time. The tradition of Agrippa, Paracelsus, and others, many of whom practised right here in Basel, regarded the alchemist as ultimately constituting the only real subject and object of his own experiment. So when Dr. Hoffman became both the subject and the object of his experiment, on that day in 1943 when he unwittingly had that first trip, he successfully invoked a spirit that has lived amongst us ever since, opening doors of perception and experience, giving us the possibility of impossible thoughts, and taking us where we never thought it was really possible to go.
Many think of alchemy as the art of turning base metal into gold by use of a philosopher’s stone or magic elixir. Using this analogy, the ultimate purpose of the alchemist is the transformation of the ordinary human life into the extraordinary by means of the knowledge of the self. Paracelsus taught here in Basel that the whole universe is reflected in man, and the keys of knowledge are the same.
In 1527, the alchemist Agrippa stressed in a letter that there is a secret interpretation and understanding which cannot be conveyed through the printed word alone, but must be transmitted from the master to the disciple, echoing Pythagoras and Plato.
And he wrote, “Whosoever therefore shall know himself, shall know all things in himself; especially he shall know God… and how all things may be fitted for all things in their time, place, order, measure, proportion and harmony…”
Agrippa was very suspicious of faith. He insisted on direct knowledge of the sacred by its experience.
I think it’s fair to say that experiences LSD and other perception altering substances created a diaspora of trippers on various quests for knowledge in the sixties. A number of signposts pointed increasingly to India. Many who I later met in India, from all over the world, would say, in effect, “LSD sent me.”
We had a glimpse of something and wanted more access to the Extraordinary World in which it lived. It compelled us to take the psychedelic experience further, and make some sense out of it.
A dear friend, Uma Giri, a Swedish Model in the sixties, who became one of the rare foreign female Naga Babas wrote, “LSD parted the veil and made an opening into something else, into more than we had ever been able to see in and around ourselves. Its atmosphere was magical and mystical, but for me, these qualities were just not reflected in the English surroundings.”
“The music, Timothy Leary, the Beatles meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: all this said to us that India was where the magic, the mystic, and that something else, might be found. People had smoked dope. But that didn’t do it. It was LSD that carried the idea of India to us all.”
A few years ago, I was visiting a collective of psychedelic young people in the States, and I couldn’t help but notice their posters of Indian Gods, mainly the God Shiva, on their walls along with other psychedelic art. Since none of them had been to India, nor seemed into an Indian spiritual thing, I was curious what they saw in the poster of Shiva. “I dunno,” said one, “it’s just cool.” At that moment, I saw myself in that young man, and realized that I had gone to India searching vocabulary.
And many of us combed the world and its religious, philosophical, and shamanic traditions, searching for a vocabulary with which we could begin to make knowledge out of perception – which we could use to start creating those categories of thinking that were so obscure in our modern consumer society.
I could only sense in my youth that those enigmatic posters of the Indian gods and goddesses were not merely decorative, but magic talismans, offering protection, capable of invoking cosmic energies, as well as a conduit to an extraordinary world. And even that magus himself, Jimi Hendrix, appeared in one. The Axis Bold as Love album cover.
The Bhagavad Gita, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and various works of Vedanta, and mythology, philosophy, started giving us words that we didn’t have before: karma, dharma, guru, nirvana, kundalini, maya, bardos, even yoga and yogi. And then the discourse of India: “All this that you see? With your eyes? Well, there’s a lot more happening. Let Aristotle be damned. This is all illusion. Who is it that’s doing the seeing, anyway?”
It was not nearly enough for me and others to read the philosophy of India, or assign meanings to the mysterious posters, which were indeed talismans of protection and guidance.
The psychedelic experience drew a line in the sand, a preliminary standard by which we could measure other mystical experience.
We watched the Earth breathe and come alive. We saw the interconnectedness of the things of nature. It was as if our consciousness itself was painting this world, or indeed, reflecting it.
The title of my talk this evening is The Edge of Indian Spirituality, and I want to explain this just a bit.
I see the mainstream representation of India in much the same way as I see the mainstream news media. Our understanding of India is an imperial culture’s construction of its colony. I clearly saw this in my own thinking, and continue to discover its artefacts in my thoughts. I felt blocked in my own attempt to penetrate below the surface of things even after a number of years in India. I discovered that I was limited by my own imagination, that my search for meaning kept turning inward upon itself. I found that the meaning I assigned to things was not new insight into an esoteric culture, but old meanings that I used new Indian words to represent. I felt like someone who was colour blind trying to correct the overwhelming blue or red dominating a photo in Photoshop.
Like a detective searching for the motive of the accused, or an archeologist digging for potsherds in his attempt to understand something that ceased to exist hundreds or thousands of years ago, I was compelled to find out who I was, what made me see the world in the way that I did, what made me organize my perceptions in a way that was consistent with the discourse of the land of my birth. For this was the only way I could truly gain entrance into the extraordinary world.
I found that the vocabulary and language of Comparative Religion, basically Christianity, and that of Psychology, only constructed an idea of India, which was different from was under my feet. It was like reading a description and analysis of an acid trip by someone who had never experienced it. All the rational thinking in the world would not take one any closer to the experience and its articulation.
I am going to travel back, past the 20th century a couple hundred years, then back past the so-called “enlightenment,” and even past the renaissance to hermetic times to find a European vocabulary to articulate the Oral Tradition in India.
As I look around our wonderful symposium here, I see a number of others, who have to do similar things to be able to articulate a knowledge largely revealed by Plant Deities and other Gods.
I was enchanted by the yogi-shamans, the Naga Babas of India – naked in ashes, long dread locks twisted with Marigolds piled on their heads like crowns, proudly austere, sitting with straight backs in some yoga asana, giving blessings to wide eyed pilgrims, seekers, and the poor, shouting out mantras and spells that charm or curse peoples’ lives. That was the public image. I couldn’t interpret, then, the hip arrogance I saw, in their sometimes bloodshot eyes.
They seemed about as far from the ordinary world one could wander, sort of my story as well, having traveled about as far from the land of my birth as one could go. They were naked, they wore ashes from their sacred fires instead of clothes. They had few possessions other than the few magical instruments like tridents, tongs, and water pots, that adorned their sacred fires. And lest I forget, chillams filled with cannabis sacrament.
It wasn’t that they were mad – it was theater, there was a narrative, something arcane from another age. If it was theater, it was also ritual, and where those two worlds met, one being the mirror image of the other, the narrative of self-knowledge is performed.
According to Indian storytelling, some 2500 years ago appeared a man who became known as Adi Shankaracharya, India’s greatest philosopher, prolific commentator of ancient texts, poet, and for our purpose here, the greatest organizer of the ancient tradition of Yogis, the founder of the monastic order known as Sannyasis. About 1500 years later, a number of lineages of Naked Yogis, or Naga Babas from among Shankaracharya’s order of Sannyasis, formalized even more ancient bonds into an association called The Akhara.
In India, today, an akhara is usually a club where traditional wrestling takes place, more often than not, in the back of a Hanuman temple. The Naked Yogis, however in The Akhara of old (and still today), performed a different kind of wrestling – outwardly intellectual, rhetorical, and political, but below the surface of their theater, operated a “human machine” called tradition, that carried knowledge down through time.
When Alexander the Great’s ambassador to the court of Patliputra (now Patna in the Indian state of Bihar), Megasthenes, observed the Naked Yogis in the fourth century B.C., he described them as gymnosophists, “naked philosophers.” There were also the so-called naked philosophers in Greece at the time, who would hang out at a gymnasium, and wrestle, naked.
The Akhara’s collected lineages look back for their origins to the Age of Treta, countless thousands of years ago, the age of the epic poem, The Ramayana, and to the Three Headed Guru of Yogis, Dattatreya, their ultimate founder. Guru Dattatreya is naked, his dread locks touch the earth.
He is the son of one of progenitors of the human race, Atreya, and his wife, the personification of female shakti, Anasuya. His three heads are those of the Indian trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, his four dogs are thought of as the most ancient and sacred texts of the Indians, the Vedas, the Cow of all Desires follows him around, and the Mother Goddess, Herself, sits on his lap. After all, he is the incarnation of her husband, Vishnu.
Dattatreya is the original Guru of yogi shamans: He who has crossed over and shows The Path. Even being an avatar (literally, “the descending one”), he is mostly known as the avadhut, a “messenger descending [from the Gods]. He is always pursued, for he is the Knower of the Self. As much the Herald as the Mentor, he makes the narrative known to those who join in his theater. The Guru provides the means of knowing the self, which reflects the entire universe.
Even today in The Akhara of Dattatreya (which is now called the “Old Akhara”), each yogi sees Dattatreya as his guru. Our physical gurus, for we start out with five, are called “witness” gurus. They give initiation to the disciple into the “oral tradition,” which is called the Tradition of Knowledge.
“Hinduism” is a recent word constructed in the West by India’s colonizers to represent a set of beliefs thought to be held by most Indians, thus a religion. But traditionally, those thought of as Hindus (originally referring to people who lived on the “other” side of the Indus River), have no concept of “Hinduism,” but speak of the sum of knowledge among their diverse traditions as the “Sanatan Dharma.” In the oral tradition of the Naga Yogis, we think of the Sanatan Dharma as the Book of the World.
The world is the container of all things and The Book of the World is its articulation. Its language is Primary Language, not Sanskrit, but a language of signatures: marks, signs, flags, and cyphers, that call our attention to outer resemblances which indicate inner, hidden relationships. The world and the sky are awash in Language, they reflect each other, as man reflects the earth and the sky.
The reader of The Book of the World becomes its commentator, and its commentary is called Shastra, the Oral Tradition. But Shastra means scripture, no? The Vedas, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, etc., the Authority of all Indian Tradition. Scriptural authority is always invoked in religious and philosophical debate, discussion, and sermon in India, not usually sufficient proof in itself, but certainly a strong component part of a convincing argument.
And, indeed it is as well within the oral tradition. In fact, the oral tradition is always quoting “scripture.” But which one(s)? I would question my gurus and fellow disciples, guru-bhais, when they would sing their shlokas to make a point. “Where does that come from?” I would ask, implying an assumed linear order to the universe.
But my gurus didn’t memorize shlokas from books, even “Holy Books,” and they didn’t use my linearity. They would “pull from the sky” the Primary Language, or pull from “what is heard” the mantras, or pull from “what is remembered” the songs and the ironies, and then perform the commentary.
An oral tradition, being pre-literate, does not mean that its members are illiterate or don’t read books. The leadership, the hierarchy, among Naga Yogis is Brahmin, normally well educated, quite literate, often keeping volumes of notebooks. The difference between a preliterate and a literate tradition has largely to do with where authority of a source of knowledge lies. A literate tradition relies on books for its authority while the pre-literate tradition relies on the spoken word. For the Naga Yogi, member of an oral tradition, the source is the tradition itself, what is said, what is heard. Not just by one’s guru or gurus, but echoed among all the lineages throughout the order.
An oral tradition is much more than the fact of oral transmission from guru to disciple. One man’s idea or system, however good or enlightened does not make a tradition. A tradition is a living thing, the embodiment of living story, which spills past the beginning and the end. A comprehensive narrative emerges, encompassing archetypical heroes, nemeses, mentors, allies, and others whose plot elements are driven by the rhythm of the moon against the background of stars and planets, beginnings, middles, and ends, and in that story content we find all the knowledge of the natural world. This narrative is repeated and acted out tens of thousands of times every day by its cast of characters. Living Theater for Living Story.
I will be the first to admit to you that when I was first initiated into the oral tradition of the Naga Sannyasis in 1970, I imagined the tradition to be a contained philosophy and practice, something finite, like a package, or a book. I had to climb this mountain, and it was there, on top, want I wanted – a pot of knowledge. And I did climb. But when I arrived in that place I had imagined as the top, I discovered that this was only the first small preparatory climb, the rambling foothills of a great mountain range, the true peaks of which remained shrouded in mist. Suddenly, its glorious majesty would reveal itself for a moment – and then back to obscurity.
I had no handles, no maps, no landmarks to determine where I was or where I was going. The only of my mentors who spoke English died within 2 years of my initiation into the ancient order. My first several years of discipleship focused on the rules and customs of the new Extraordinary World in which I somehow arrived.
I wanted to know why we did things in a particular way. I wanted to know how all the rules and rituals connected together to mean something or make something. I really wanted books, I wanted to study about what I was immersed in. But there were no books as there were no classes nor examinations. I had to find the authority for knowledge from the voices of the tradition itself.
My first secret sacred knowledge was that of removing ghee-grease from pots and pans using cold water and vibhuti, sacred ash. I mastered that quickly, but went on to practice it for several years. This was a small knowledge that I gained.
The mantras, practices, and other forms of respecting nature were not so easy. I didn’t know what the mantras meant, but did my best to mimic what I heard, and I tried my best to imitate how others performed the rituals and pujas.
I vainly attempted to construct the world of Naga Yogis in my imagination, but I found that my castles crumbled with each new insight I stumbled over. Obscurity is the agent’s biggest problem. It took me many years to understand anything, and many more years to be able to articulate what I understood.
Becoming a baba starts out as an exercise in copying and mimicking. This is to prepare the soil for a great spirit to enter. Many great spirits live in the world of babas, some benign, some horrific. Some spirits pass through whole lineages of yogis, while some might possess individuals. And in some, passes the spirit of Guru Dattatreya, himself.
The Akhara of Dattatreya, located in Ujjain, Central India, is one of the monastic homes of the spirit of Guru Dattatreya for many millenia. His spirit passes into the body of the spiritual leader of The Akhara, called the Pir during a vedic rite of abhishekh. “Pir” is actually a Persian word, used largely by Muslim Sufis to refer to a spiritual leader, and this demonstrates Dattatreya’s iconoclasm. The Pir will never leave the Akhara, and we he dies, his body is buried inside the compound – Dattatreya Akhara is also a mausoleum of all the Pirs possessed by Guru Dattatreya going back thousands of years.
As my guru, Hari Puri Ji Maharaj, instructed me at the time of my initiation, my entrance into this world, that he was only a shakshi, “witness” guru, as were the other four Naga Babas that completed my “Five Gurus.” The Guru is Dattatreya, Himself. But He is obscure. Manifested, but very removed, hard to know.
“There are bodies we must choose,” said Hari Puri Baba just before he left his body for the last time, “that have certain minds, certain dispositions. These become suitable for passing the Tradition down through time.”
These aren’t the only spirits floating through space possessing bodies. There are various spirits of love, hatred, aesthetic perfection, patriotism, violence, and benevolence among the vast world of spirit beings that inhabit humans. Humans become possessed by the spirits of deities, rivers, planets, and celestial dancers as well.
The process of becoming a yogi, a commentator of The Book of the World, is a process of absorption rather than study as we know it. In the course of one’s life living inside of the Tradition, one may hear the same story told many times by one’s guru, and each time there might be some additions and anecdotes, giving one the impression that somewhere there is a huge living story, which is simply too big and complicated to tell or sing, and the stories from the mouths of its tellers are only small portions of it. And one hears the story told by others in the tradition, some articulate and intellectual, some mystical, and some just plain entertaining. The “real” story” is not in the language of commentary, but that primal language of The Book of the World, itself. If one could put together all the recitations of the story, by all members of the tradition, now and forever, then one would have the whole text.
There’s a lot of information, and there’s a lot of illusion and falsehood in the world. We search for authority. The Tradition provides handles – the “playing field” and the rules of the extraordinary world and the guru is the mark of authority of knowledge.
The Guru is no longer a human being of the ordinary world. He has completed his worldly obligations to family and caste, marked it by a ritual funeral, and joined a mythological world. He has crossed over to the other side.
He becomes the point of contact with The Tradition, his disciple’s patron, protector, witness, and mentor. To the disciple, he is The Tradition, itself, the living commentary of the Book of the World.
According to the oral tradition of the Naga yogis, the main role of the yogi in his relationship with the world is to give blessings. He is not a preacher, and only a teacher in a very general sense of making people aware of the importance and direction of knowing oneself, and therefore bringing more balance and happiness into one’s life. The “world” comes to the yogi for his blessings, that magic touch, which makes the impossible happen and charms one’s life – bringing health and prosperity.
But, the Yogi doesn’t have the blessings to give in the first place. Blessings – Prosperity, Health, and Well-being, are the nature and substance of the Earth Mother. We know Her, by Her fertility which resembles a rich blanket of vegetation growing on Her surface, the fields of grain, Her mango trees heavy with ripe fruit, and her herds with udders full of milk. She is often pictured with sugar cane stalks, for Her taste is sweet. The Yogi, having an uncluttered mind resembling that of a still mirror like lake, is connected (yoga) with Her, and acts like a conduit through which HER blessings flow.
The practice of the Naga Yogi consists of identifying all Her personalities, whether benevolent or catastrophic, and to each one, offering respect. Having put all the petty illusions of his ego in their proper places Her benevolence may flow unimpeded.
With one’s mortal gurus and guru-bhais as witnesses, one calls on Guru Dattatreya for teachings. And he comes and sings his song through the mouths of his yogis and other devotees. His words, on the surface, in translation, tickle us with their irony and iconoclasm, he tells us:
Birth and death, freedom and bondage, false and true
Belong to mind, not to you.
Why do you weep my son,
Nor you nor I have name or form?
If everything is one, being freedom itself,
Why become absorbed in the self?
Why become absorbed in the non-self?
Why become absorbed in being
or absorbed in non-being?
The Pure is not found by yoga’s eight limbs
nor found by quashing mind’s whims,
not by initiation from a guru, until
awakening on its own, it’s bright self shown.
I am not a guru, I give no rite
I have no work to which I’m tied.
My true nature unembodied and clear
is like the starry hemisphere.
All this is on the surface is meant to be attractive and entertaining. It is very translatable and makes for interesting listening or reading. The translation appeals to our rational thinking, it makes good sense and is articulate in English and other languages, which has little to do with how it may sound in Sanskrit.
For in Sanskrit, in the bursting out in song that lives beneath the voices of its singers, in its hypnotic meter and rhyme, in the nuances and duplicities of words and sounds and their meanings that could never be anything but what they are, portals open up again.
He sings through us:
“jnanamrtam samarasam gaganopamoham”
We sing it forty times. Do you think he’s trying to make a point?
It is Guru Dattatreya’s refrain, punctuating all of Alice’s rabbit holes; a line that has never left me alone since the moment I first heard it. It echoed through my head. It made me chant it. It is a line which is at the very foundation of the Tradition of Knowledge. And, one finds curious resemblances with the Hermetic traditions as well.
Being a Westerner, my nature is to first consider the grammatical subject of the line, and sure enough the subject is “I,” “aham,..’ and then the verb, an implied, “to be.” How do I translate the implications of having the subject so far away from the action, at the tail end of an articulation, as much for meter as for clarity, a final “aham.”
I am “the immortality of knowledge” – jnanaamritam,” a mere lifting of “a” to “aa”, by fusion, takes us from death to immortality, “a mrita,” is literally, “no death.” Amrita is also nectar or elixir, and we will call it the Elixir of Immortality.
“We got the juice,” says the Pir of Dattatreya Akhara. Well, he used the word, “rasa.” Rasa has many meanings, the most common is juice, and it’s often used as “essence” as well. But there is also a transformative element in this essence, as rasa can also be Mercury, Quicksilver, a shape-shifter, capable of transforming other things. Rasayana is alchemy as it is the rejuvenation of the body.
Mercury-Hermes was the “Messenger of the Gods” in the ancient Mediterranean. Translated into Sanskrit that would be, “Avadhuta,” the common name of Guru Dattatreya, and the name of his song. “Thrice Great” Hermes Trismegistus bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Avadhut,” who’s three heads are those of the Indian Trinity.
The Pir had been an alchemist. He vehemently denied he had ever turned base metal into gold, but nevertheless had been attacked in his youth by robbers, looking for his loot. They couldn’t find his formulae, they were in his head. And he had no books.
Sama is one of those expansive words that finds articulation in countless languages around the world. “Same” in English, for example. In almost any bazaar in the world, traders and shoppers understand the expression, “sama-sama,” “same-same.” Two things that in some way are the same. Sama suggests similarity, equivalence, things that are in balance, using man as the fulcrum of all proportions.
Our surprise and delight in seeing identical twins is based on the irony of “same but different.” It’s not their “equality” that attracts us, it’s the fact that there’s an essential similarity that the two people share, and we want to know what that similitude is. Samarasa speaks to us of essential sameness, of similitude.
The key is the concluding statement gagana upama aham. Gagana is the firmament, the night sky. There are many words for sky, such as akash, which means “where the light comes from.” So lets think of gagana as the firmament, which is a dome housing stars and planets. Upama is a word indicating comparison, resemblance, simile, analogue. Aham is not simply, “I am,” but also is the “a” and “ha”, the “alpha” and “omega,” the beginning and the end, and everything in between. Appreciating the approximation involved: Dattatreya says,
“I am the Analogue,
reflecting the firmament,
the immortal Elixir of Knowledge.”
Hidden samarasa-similitude is indicated on the surface of things – a visible mark for an invisible analogy – to make it known. The dome of the sky reflects of the dome of our speech, from our throat to our lips. The stations of articulation and their operations in Speech mark the vocal apparatus as the heavenly bodies mark the firmament. The domes are analogues of each other. For, as the stars are the witnesses and therefore the storytellers, crisscrossing all lives and all events, now and forever, Speech makes those stories known and establishes the possibilities of all knowledge. Knowledge is transported in the boat of storytelling on the Ocean of Story. The “speech” of the sky contains within it the language of The Book of the World, whose syllables reside in the sacred geography of our mouths.
The operations of the vocal chords and the breath (such as its retention, exhalation through the mouth, and through the nose) taking place at five stations of articulation, ranging from our throat to our lips, give rise to the 50 syllables (from “a” to “ha”) which are the elements forming the foundation of Speaking and therefore, Knowledge. These syllables create the world, and at the same time contain all the possibilities of knowing that world. We worship these collective syllables as the Mother Goddess, and individually as Matrikas, Little Mothers.
We make pilgrimages to those shrines, crossing over places, of sacred geography of the mouth, beat the drums and ring the bells, there, for worship, and use each one of the holy places to erect mirrors of Her sacred syllables, which then reflect all of Her creation.
It is said that before there was Speaking, Shiva one day played his double headed, and the sound of each beat produced a Little Mother, who is known by her syllable.
The striking of the drum resembles the striking of the vocal apparatus to produce syllables. The syllables that rolled off Shiva’s drum, known as Maheshwara Sutra, emerged in such an arrangement as to give Speaking its greatest possibilities.
I once asked Hari Puri Maharaj why it seemed that all the greatest yogis were also grammarians. “It’s the same thing,” he explained to me and continued, “the Yoga Sutra sprang from the mouth of Patanjali, spontaneously, but it took him eighty years to compose his Mahabhashya, his shastra on Grammar.” The most “famous” grammar in the three world was composed by Ravan, the arch demon, himself. And then there is a long list of gods, rishis, and yogis who composed their grammars up until the time of Panini, who is thought of as the last of the great grammarians, about 2500 years ago.
“There are seven million two hundred seventy two thousand three hundred eleven nadis, subtle tubes of energy, in the human body, the yogi is he who counts them all! And how do you count them? First you have to distinguish them from each other by their vibration, their sound. Then you have to make a great chain, a garland of all the sounds, and here’s the trick: you have to know how sounds fit together, link up, and then maintain the integrity of the chain. You don’t want it to break on you. That’s why yogis are grammarians and vice versa.”
“The arrangement of Nature might appear chaotic but it is not accidental. When I saw that Nature placed two things next to each other, I realized this to be an interior connection between them and that they share a similarity. And in this bond, properties, movements, and influences are exchanged. Syllables and sounds are linked together as they touch and change each other. Everything in the world is adjacent to something else, and so is linked into a great chain of the things of the world.”
The Mother of Creation is known as Saraswati. Her onomatopoeic name reflects that primal contact of earth and water, the Striking. One can almost hear that name if one listens to water running over stones in a stream, sarsarasara…. And She has many other names as well. One of them is Speech. She is the power, the shakti of articulation, of Speaking, and Knowledge. She creates the world with the Primordial Word. A striking of the string on her Vina.
In fact She is that primordial word. Before there was the world, there was pure consciousness the tradition calls Shiva. One may think of Shiva as the simple syllable “a,” an articulation that is yet to manifest anything.
Pronounce it, “a.” It’s a sound we produce when our thought has not yet crystallized, when we don’t remember something… “aaaaa…. what is his name?” It’s the foundational sound to our speaking.
“A” is the world in potential, but as yet, without differentiation. Our first beholding of Saraswati is in the stress which arises from the divine desire of the One to be Many; for the undifferentiated One to know Itself… first creating Two, subject and object. The first movement which takes place both in the Dome of Speaking, and in the World is from “a” to “i.”
Feel it, pronounce it. “aaa – iii.” “I” is called the seed syllable of Desire, Kama Bija.
The narrative of creation thus becomes an analogue of Speech. As the story unfolds, so does movement take place in the Dome of Speech. The syllables unfold in the Dome of Speech as so many Little Mothers giving birth to the world, combusting in that first movement from “a” to “i.”
According to that narrative, primordial consciousness, the potential subject of knowledge, the syllable “a,” and primordial matter, nature, as yet unmanifest, the potential object of knowledge, the syllable “i,” appear through Cosmic Mind Stuff – reflected in an unruffled mirror-lake of Intellect, into a separation between a subject and an object of knowledge.
A discrimination arises between the Same and the Other, which are identical reflections of one another. The world’s existence requires a drop in the mirror-lake, causing a ripple, a desire for identity, for separation. That first rippled reflection of I-dentity, ahamkara, Ego, appears as Movement, itself, and three qualities, excite this drop into its full manifestation of the world.
With The Active pulling, The Passive resisting, and The Balanced balancing, the world comes into existence with a thunderous “a-ham.” The syllables all join together in a chain of the world. And according to how those sounds of the syllable coalesce in our dome of speech, how they join together, now determines how we know that world.
Where the “la” syllable is produced, the tongue points to the teeth, which perform the function of eating resembling the Earth, it’s produce and the breaking up the solid matter. “La” is density – the earth is to subsistence of all, like the teeth are to the human body. And teeth are adjacent to tongue as earth is adjacent to water.
Where the “wa” syllable is produced, the lips come together, thought is externalized through the lips as the flow of expression, an analogue of the flow (sara) of water giving expression of the world from cosmic thought. “Wa” syllable corresponds to Wa-ter and is the name of the Creatrix, Saraswati, as Wak, Speech.
In the direction of less density, the friction of the tongue on the roof of the mouth producing the “ra” syllable, is hot, reflecting Fire. The tongue points upwards towards the intellect, where the data gathered from the organs of knowledge is digested, and towards the Sun, whose light will reveal the world.
The “ya” syllable, which you can experience arising out of “i” (i-ya), is produced as the tongue moves towards and slides towards our seed syllable of desire, “i” – pointing and moving towards Feeling, hence Touch and it’s objectification, the element, Air, which is also its density.
The “ha” syllable requires the least effort and corresponds to the element of least density, Ether, which reflects space and time, which is perceived by Hearing. It arises out of the formless “a.” “Ham” is though of as the effortless roar which accompanies the full manifestation of the World.
These syllables, Little Mothers, along with their 45 sisters constitute (sacred articulation of) the World and its knowledge.
The garland of these syllables, the varna mala, Kali’s necklace of skulls, is a chain of convenience, in which all things of the world are proximate to each other. Convenience is an upama, a resemblance, connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. In the adjacency of syllables an upama of “place’ appears, marking a site upon which nature has placed two things, and between those two things, movement, influences, passions, and properties are communicated. Even among syllables. This relationship is the “hidden” reason for their adjacency, upon which is superimposed the visible mark.
Upama-resemblance, however, is not limited to place, and is able to function without motion, from a distance, like the reflection from a mirror, a duplication of the world. Reflection enables things to imitate one another from one end of the universe to the other without connection or proximity. Distance does not exist between things reflecting each other through space, any more so than the distance can be measured between your reflected face and the surface of the mirror.
Upama as Analogy joins together Proximity and Reflection, and through it, all the marks and signs of the universe can be drawn together. We can see that analogy in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad:
Truly, the dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse;
the sun his eye; the wind his breath; the universal fire his open mouth.
The year is the body of the sacrificial horse;
the sky his back; the atmosphere his stomach…
the stars his bones; the clouds his flesh…
Things resemble each other. Signatures of the world tell us where the upama-analogy lies, how one sees it, or by what mark it may be recognized.
Adi Shankaracharya established his main monastery, Sringeri Math, where he witnessed a pregnant frog trying to cross the deadly hot sands in the noon day sun, trying to reach the river. Then he saw a cobra, whose favourite food is frog, slithering up to the poor animal, and upon reaching her, spread his hood, revealing his fangs, but to Shankara’s great surprise, the cobra used his spread hood as an umbrella to protect the mother-to-be, and provide shade, so she could safely reach the river. He, thus found the “signature” of Sarada Devi, Goddess of articulation and knowledge, and it was there that he built her temple.
The story being played out in the ashram or the circle of the lineage is always an analogue of the story told by the sky, a reflection of the firmament. The activity on any particular day is consistent with the phase of the moon, the position of the sun in the ecliptic, the relationships of planets and stars, and the day of the week. The sky determines feasting and fasting, honouring and invoking different personalities of nature, times of gatherings, initiations, and empowerments, meetings, travel, pilgrimage, times of silence, times of giving, times of receiving, and many other things.
One day, out of morbid curiosity, I opened a Hari Krishna newsletter, spam, that was in my email. In it, Lord Krishna, was described in such a pathetic monotheistic manner, that he appeared to me as the plastic Jesus of shopping mall born again Christians. So I dashed them off an email protesting their demeaning and insulting of Lord Krishna. The editor was surprised, as he probably receives reams of mail challenging their claims of the supremacy of Krishna, and here I was saying the opposite. I accused them of being Orientalists, of superimposing Western Culture, in this case Christianity, on the East and its culture. So he sent me three pages of quotes translated into English from the Shrimad Bhagavatam that supported what they wrote. I thanked him for the beautiful verses, and I truly appreciated them, but I wanted to know one thing. I wanted to know where Authority was located. In the ink on the page or from the mouth of the guru? He correctly explained that the guru articulates and interprets what is written in Scripture. But suppose, just SUPPOSE, for a moment, that there was some contradiction between your guru and the Srimad Bhagavatam, that on a particular point guru and scripture disagree. What do you take to be the ultimate authority? I will admit it was a trap, shamelessly I set him up. Scripture, he answered.
The monotheist religions require a central doctrine, and a central text, which is the basis for that doctrine, that’s why they have been called the Religions of the Book. “The Book” was originally manuscripts, and eventually printed texts. Their authority lies within the “book.”
When the colonizers of the 18th-19th centuries and their scribes in the human sciences wanted to map Indian thinking, they had the daunting task of defining indigenous Indian religion in such a way that it could fit in the categories laid out for it and put it on the grid of all things. They had to construct, as it were, an Indian religion, so that it also would have a central definitive doctrine and a central text. A printed text.
The printed text has been indispensable to knowledge in our modern world until the advent of the video screen and internet.
We have critical editions of Indian texts, which scholars have created by comparing several different manuscripts of the same text. Scholars then edited out obvious errors, and used their academically honed deductive logic to determine other mistakes, omissions and additions, and determined originality and genesis. And these “original” manuscripts were often commissioned by the aristocracy, so that someone listened to an oral rendition of a text or its commentary and wrote it down. And of course, when word got out that Europeans were looking for manuscripts, the frauds and forgeries also appeared, by the truckload. One of the most famous being the “Ezourvedam,” a fraudulent text composed by Jesuit missionaries in Pondicherry (French colony in India), to demonstrate the inferiority of the idolatrous Indians compared to Christianity. Voltaire, God bless his soul, used this text, believing its authenticity, to demonstrate the subtlety and superiority of Indian thought to a decadent Christianity.
You have a yogi in the oral tradition, who is reading the Book of the World and commenting on it daily, and someone comes along and writes down what he says or sings. And then his words, or at least what are recorded as his words, are removed from his body, from his lips. This is the manuscript. It’s as if a snapshot of a day in the life of the oral tradition.
I’m reminded of Magritte’s painting of a pipe that has the words prominently written across the canvas, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Well, can you smoke it?
The words require a voice, and that particular voice of authority in the oral tradition provides the context and the exegesis. Once removed from its source the text may now take on a life of its own. Interpretations may be read into it, it may be edited, updated, made more clear, translated. The words may undergo some sort of transformation, according to the needs of the academy, not according to the dynamic of tradition. And, they are forbidden from leaving their pages, imprisoned by the front and end covers of the book.
Guttenberg and his printing press started the modern process of taming the wild profusion of knowledge, “civilizing” vast overgrown tracts of wilderness. Knowledge started migrating into the printed page, where it could be safe, and where it could be safely displayed like the wild animals in the cages of a zoo. The more it migrated, the more it became information and the more it lost its context. But in the process, it gained a much larger audience than that only within the reach of a voice, and as such, usurped the authority of that voice.
Books demand literacy, which was rare when they first started showing their covers. A modern education, culture and discursive reasoning were necessary if they were to be useful, even if one could find access to the product, itself. Amazon was a big woman in those days. But most important of all, the culture of literacy demanded a change in the way language was used.
Language and the World became disconnected. Language began to express man’s ideas about the world rather than being an articulation of the world itself. A new mapping process began. Words got lost, they no longer marked anything and were condemned to live only on the pages of books, from which they were borrowed to colonize people’s speech.
Indian Tradition has it that in each day in the life of Brahma resides a full cycle of time for the world, divided into four ages. Everything begins perfect, everyone’s enlightened, and its all downhill from there, until we reach the bottom of the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, in which we are now, and that culminates in a great dissolution, “pralaya.” Then, after a very long timeless moment, a new cycle arise out of the same pralaya. There’s no New Age in the Sanatan Dharma.
So it is with the Oral Tradition and Readers of the World, a process takes place, not unlike the children’s game of Post Office, in which someone whispers a statement in another’s ear, and that statement is passed in a circle from whispering lips to waiting ears. The further down the line it goes, the more the statement degrades from the original. In the case of the Oral Tradition, the Primary Language remains the same, it’s written in the sky, after all; the commentary must change. This is supposed to happen. If an oral tradition is not dynamic, it dies of stasis. The articulation of the commentary must have a relationship with the world’s current discourse, and its here we discover its contraction.
One day in Varanasi, I asked Kapil Puri Maharaj, one of my gurus, the date of Adi Shankaracharya. He replied that Adi Shankaracharya, son of Shivaguru and Aryamba, was born on Vaisaka Shukla Pancami (the fifth day of the bright half of the moon in the month of April-May), under Purnavasu (a star in Gemini), in Kaliyuga 2593 (corresponding to 509 B.C.).
One of Guru Ji’s disciples was sitting there, a young baba, who had risen to the top of Sampurnanand’s Sanskrit College there (many babas also receive a high level education), raised a question. He said that now we have extensive libraries and can compare many texts, and we have scholars who do research in these texts to find out many interesting things, such as the time of Adi Shankaracharya.
He went on to explain that by finding dates that can be confirmed by historical methodology, scholars can assign dates with reasonable accuracy. From references in his texts, his style, references or lack of references to him, his guru’s texts, and their connections, scholars have dated Adi Shankaracharya as having lived in the 8th century A.D.
I thought Guru Ji was going to have him wash out his mouth with Chandrika Soap.
Isn’t this amazing? Adi Shankaracharya is arguably India’s greatest ever philosopher, prolific composer of many of India’s greatest texts, as well as India’s greatest religious reformer, and yet we have a dispute of 1300 years as to the period of his lifetime.
Kapil Puri spent the rest of the afternoon narrating the lineages of Adi Shankaracharya, the numbers of years each one occupied the Seat of Authority, until he covered the 2500 years the Oral Tradition articulates as the time that has passed since his lifetime.
It seemed like a big crack going right down the middle of the bell-metal of this ancient tradition; a flag marking a collision taking place beneath the surface of the world.
Years later I would see that my young guru-bhai, who is now one of the spiritual leaders among Naga Yogis, had absorbed the tradition of our gurus, but uses his knowledge of yet another world, that of the academy, to increase his scope of commentary, in which he can distinguish the oral tradition.
But where does it leave the vast majority of seekers? Where may one seek authority, now that Speaking and Writing are no longer the prose of the world but spring from the fickle ideas of man, pumped up by media, and now the all-knowing video screen. Google and Wikopedia have taken over, and with their overlordship, things are frozen in their ironic identity. Things can be nothing more than what they appear to be. Those hidden relationships between things of the world and between words and things have become deceptive as upama-resemblance has lost communication with its own surface marks.
Content-less words, without reflection or resemblance to fill their emptiness, unattached to anything, float off on their own, like balloons randomly drifting through space. They are no longer the mark of things, but sleep between the pages of books that gather dust.
The Yogi who once read nature and books alike as part of a single text, who put mirrors to the world revealing the secret upamas beneath its signs and marks, is now the rare laboratory animal of the researcher in the human sciences. The New Age places him in the same category as fantastic gods and demons, to be discovered among piles of lonely words in the cages of books and on the TV or computer screen.
What has become important is identities and differences, no longer resemblances. The consumer age is built on marketing. The age of resemblance has been left behind, and it leaves in its wake, games, whose enchantment grows out of the new kinship between resemblance and illusion, and the distorted memory of an oral tradition in which all the things in the world could be linked indiscriminately to man’s experiences, theatre, or credulities.
The noble, rigorous, and restrictive figure of the Yogi is to be forgotten.
The signs that mark him are to be thought of as the fantasies and charms of a knowledge that had not yet attained marketability.
The new yogi stands on his head and marvels us with his contortions and acrobatics. His body is perfect, he’s vegan, eats egg-less egg salad, and drives a nice car, for the world rewards him for his teachings.
But, magic happens where worlds meet. Where the world of the Oral Tradition of the Naked Yogis from India meets the Symposium of Consciousness in Basel. Let’s not buy and sell for the moment, nor shop or advertise. I am not for a moment suggesting that any of you renounce the world and go live in a cave. I’m not suggesting you go find yourself a guru, nor study the Indian scriptures, or philosophy.
I’m holding a mirror up to you this evening, a mirror I found in some cave in India. Yes, the mirror is Indian, it’s handcrafted by the lineages of the oral tradition. Take a look in it. You see yourself… and your land, and your culture. Your Mother Ganges is your Mother Rhine, here in Basel, she gave birth to Basel. And look she points north in a bended knee, as does the Ganges in Shiva’s city, Varanasi. The Mother Rhine is not H2O, she is a great Goddess of Articulation, who brought prosperity and high culture to a vast tract of Europe. Just 400 kilometres downstream, on her banks, Guttenberg invented the printing press. But she is known for her most dense attribute, her water, which in my mirror appears as holy water. It’s powerful and it’s free.
I believe a time has come for us all to become true yogis, “connected ones.” Yoga comes from yuj, meaning to connect. Connected with the Earth Mother, connected with Her Earth Spirits, Her Plant Deities, and each other. The Earth Spirits are sad, not because they are languishing beneath countless tons of cement, but because we have forgotten them. It is my hope and prayer that, nourished by the sacred work of Dr. Hoffman, and a number of others in this wonderful congress, we may connect once more with all the forces and personalities of nature to protect our earthly home.
Last year while sitting at my sacred fire on the banks of the Ganges, a young baba, who I’ve known for a number of years had something on his mind. “Baba,” he asked me, “What is this… drop?” The question delighted me, yet I feigned ignorance. To which drop are you referring, I asked him. He thought about it for a moment before bursting out, “the drop that contains the whole world!”
As I questioned him further, he told me that he had tried one, and then went on to narrate his experience. I noticed a profound difference between his first trip and mine. For me, that first trip opened up worlds that I didn’t know existed, whereas for him, it made more clear and articulate a world that he was already familiar with.
“I had to pee,” he said, and explained that he went over to a wall, but the wall told him not to do it here. Then he went over to some bushes, but the bushes also forbid him, and wherever he went the spirit of that place communicated with him preventing him from peeing. Finally he left the compound of the ashram, and found a lonely spot in a desolate field. For him, the silent language of the world became spoken, and the whole world beckoned his attention with their comments, prohibitions, and jokes.
But when he returned to his two tripping companions, other babas, he found that as the world’s silence became chatter, he no longer needed to speak with his friends, as they could now communicate inside of each other’s heads. In fact, they discovered they could visit each other’s bodies.
They went over to the temple in the far end of the compound. There, the deities were no longer confined by the carved stone in which they were housed, but emerged in all their slendour, dazzling the three young babas. “Their shapes kept changing, and then they took the three of us for a quick tour of the heavens.”
The acid had served to make their mythological realities that much more lucid. They had no hallucinations, there was no confusion, everything seemed to become crystal clear.
When I asked him if he would every try it again, he smiled. “Why? You got any? he asked.
Goddess bless you all!
May The Earth Mother bless all of you with health, happiness, prosperity, and knowledge!
Worship a plant deity! Hug an Earth Spirit! And love each other!
Thank you!
