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| AHYMSIN newsletter, issue - July 2011 | ||||||||
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‘Last Words of the Rishi’Retreat with Swami Veda, the Netherlands, June 10-14, 2011by Dirk GyselsIntroductionIt was said that this late spring retreat with the enigmatic title ‘Last words of the Rishi’ in a wooded area in the south of the Netherlands, would be the last retreat in Holland with a ‘speaking’ Swami Veda. (But as he assured us during the retreat: if we take care of all practical aspects, he will come again to sit with us silently from 2014 onwards). 140 participants from many parts of Europe didn’t want to miss this opportunity. I wondered in which sense this awareness of the closing of a cycle would color the general atmosphere of the retreat. My anticipation was true: it did influence the feel of the gathering as well as its contents, but in a way I did not expect. During the retreat, skillfully, our collective mindfield was geared towards looking upon Swami Veda’s upcoming 5-7 years of silence as a joyful occasion. We were shown how, from that level of supreme Silence, transmission and guidance will be even more powerful and clear. This made the retreat truly epochal. Apart from Swami Veda, the three other teachers Asutosh Sharma, Swami Ritavan and Swami Nitya , both on a conceptual and experiential level, presented us with the tools to link up with this Silence and make it our own. Using the Mundaka Upanishad and Guru Gita as the framework for the transmission was a brilliant idea. Verses of both scriptures were presented in the context of meditational practices and this worked very well. To truly take advantage of the retreat, Swami Veda advised us to look upon the monastery as an ashram and, for a couple of days, to leave all worldly concerns at the gates: “Don’t worry for them, they will still be there waiting for you.” But as I can testify myself, with a clear mind and a broader vision, they looked much more insignificant. Joints & Glands and Hatha with Asutosh: welcoming the day in an optimal way.
Led by Sonia, we chanted these moving verses from Shankara as part of the morning prayers. Then, as silent as the atmosphere evoked by the Sankrit shloka’s, Asutosh enters the hall and seats himself, his hands folded before his heart in the Namaste gesture. Instantly, the guna of silence even deepens. Whenever Ashu leads a session, he radiates equipoise, gentleness, excellence, full mastery over the words he speaks and the tone in which they are spoken. He enables the participants to close their eyes and to surrender to his masterful guidance. During the 90 minutes, I could feel a deep stillness reverberating through my body. The body could shed its stiffness, but at the same time it became even more quiet. When Asutosh, again with a Namaste and his wishes for a pleasant day, leaves the packed hall, one feels how pleasant it is for the mind to have a more relaxed, awakened and flexible body. Pilgrimage to the guhachara: the Cave of the Heart
Swami Ritavan is, as he said himself, a ‘man of few words’. Instead of too much elaborating on the metaphysics of the Mundaka, he chose to lead us through the methodologies that were hinted at in the second canto of the Mundaka Upanishad: how to enter the Guhachara, the inner cave of the Heart. Swami Rama, in his commentary on the Mundaka Upanishad says that the details of these practices are given in the tantric tradition. Swami Ritavan guided us in a number of these kriyas that enable the practitioners to become aware of the subtle energy body. These methodologies are indeed a trademark of the living, oral tradition of the Himalayan adepts. Guided by his presence and voice, he skillfully led us through various pathways and points, training our attention to become more and more subtle and focused. At one session, using a variation of the well known 31 points exercise, he brought us to the Indweller in the core of our spiritual heart. Gradually he was preparing us for manasa puja, the inner worship of the Divine Light as an expression of our very Self in the Guhachara. Swami Ritavan showed us that Upanishadic study is not merely the study of ancient texts. These verses come alive when decoded in an experiential way by the age-old methodologies provided by an able guide like Swamiji. Making the Guru come aliveWhen a teacher announces to go into a period of prolonged silence, it is not a bad thing to explore what is actually the meaning and function of the concept of ‘guru’. The answer to this question will help clarify the nature of the guidance when the verbal interaction with a teacher comes to an end. To find an answer to this question, Swami Nityamuktananda expanded upon the first verses of the Sri Guru Gita, a major part of the Skanda Purana. Swami Nitya herself is a born teacher. She is a treasure house of erudition coupled with a vast experience of various meditative approaches. This combination results in her ability to make unfamiliar concepts easy to digest. She is a master in out-of-box thinking, presenting insights and correspondences that regularly make our minds come to a standstill. Preparing the ground for diving into ‘Song of the Teacher’, Swami Nitya started off with juxtaposing our educational system with the traditional ones. Nowadays, as we all can testify, studying is about assimilating facts and being able to reproduce them. It is about treating facts as objective as ‘true’, ignoring the ‘fact’ (pun intended) that we are just reconstructing sensory input by using the existing memory files in our mind. This fabrication is erroneously seen as objective knowledge. The vantage point of sacred traditions is different. In these approaches knowledge deals first and foremost with the ‘knower’. Who is the one who claims to know? As Swami Rama said repeatedly: “How can you know anything if you don’t know yourself’?” This kind of experiential knowledge only dawns when one reverentially looks upon the entire universe as the teacher. In this sense, life is the teacher. Authentic human gurus, the ones eulogized by the Guru Gita, have crossed the gap between knowledge and life. As American Indian wise men say: such a one walks her talk. When the whole universe, when life itself is teaching us about ourselves, then the spoken or the written word can only contain a fraction of the entire spectrum of knowledge. So, when we cultivate the right attitude, situations, encounters, inner experiences and so forth are our teachers as well. A true guru will be able to transmit experiential knowledge in this way because he or she is a channel for the transmission of intelligent energy (Shakti). So the concept of ‘guru’ is much vaster than a mere human teacher. The Guru Gita reveals three different levels of this Teaching Presence:
True to the spirit of the teaching, the sage Suta who is the spokesman of this knowledge, empathically states: “It is not me speaking, but Shiva, a name for the infinite, the unmanifest potential”. Shiva is speaking to Parvati, the Shakti (Intelligent, manifesting Energy) at Mount Kailash, meeting place of heaven and earth, the unmanifest and the manifest. In this sublime setting, purified by the fire of years of tapasya, in a gesture of surrender and humility, only then the revelation of the guru can happen. Parvati expresses her readiness by touching her guru’s feet. Swami Nitya explains that the feet are our most solid part., they stand for the earth element. For us, average human beings, they symbolize our ‘dirt’, the karmas we carry along. The guru’s feet, on the contrary, are solidified godliness. Bowing to or serving the guru’s feet is bowing to existence, loving everything because the guru’s feet are everywhere. This uncompromising contemplation on the omnipresent supreme Guru is true mindfulness. Swami Nitya uses Parvati’s tapasya to put the question in the group: ‘And we, what are we willing to give up in order to receive guru diksha?’ In the Song of the Teacher, the Guru is often addressed as Sri Guru. Since Vedic times Sri connotes the feminine presence of Wisdom, Auspiciousness, Harmony. The knowledge about Sri, which flows from the guru mind, is Sri Vidya, the highest initiatory wisdom taught in the Himalayan tradition. This highest wisdom unfolds in meditation and surrender. But before we are able to truly surrender, we have to know what we want to surrender and why! Sooner or later, we will have to face the shadows in ourselves, the way we deal with the four primitive fountains. And so, Swami Nithya invites us to deep contemplations, inner dialogue, emotional purification. Then and only then, the ‘guru’ will become alive for us. Mundaka Upanishad: an introduction to ‘Sathyasa sathyam’, the ‘truth of the truth’Of course we were all very eager to hear Swami Veda’s words of wisdom. And he did not disappoint us! Full of vigor, from a space of infinite calmness inside, he effortlessly captivated the audience day after day.
Swami Veda started his exposition of the Mundaka Upanishad, with the chanting of the Shantipath, a term which he defined as a ‘recitation of self pacification’. Using four times the word swasti is an invocation of the forces of benevolence in the universe and in ourselves. Without inner peace, without the benevolent support of all forces, Brahma Vidya, the wisdom of the Upanishads, cannot be received. The Shantipath is mantric language. In this kind of language, SVB asserts, one doesn’t always form complete sentences, 1 or 2 words are enough to evoke a meaning, so that Silence does not have to broken without necessity. To receive the knowledge, the Shantipath implores: ‘May all our limbs be stilled’ This includes the inner constituents of our personality so that our lifespan will be in the form of devas, the Shining Beings . With this introduction, Swami Veda set the tone for his exposition on the initial verses of this Upanishad. ‘This Upanishad is for the monks or ‘shaven-headed’, so we don’t qualify for it’, Swami said with a chuckle. In line with Swami Rama’s translation, he broke down the term ‘upanishad’ into ‘upa’, ‘closeness’,as a quality of a clear attuned mind which knows no distances, ‘shad’ which has various meanings, one of them to loosen bondage so that one is able to attain’ and ‘ni’, the annihilation of avidya or ignorance. Swami Veda always started by chanting the verse he intends to explain. The text opens with an overview of the origin and first lineage bearers of this Brahma Vidya. The first proponent of the supreme Wisdom was Brahma or Hiranyagarbha. SVB asserts that it is short-sighted to assume Brahma - Hiranyagarbha to be an embodied being, he (or it or she) is a universal mind field. According to his analysis, Hiranyagarbha, the first deva, has four basic powers in which he excels above all other minds: dharma or lawfulness, jnana or knowledge, vairagya translated by Swamiji as being without colours (or blemishes) and aiswarya: supreme sovereignity. These are all qualities of buddhi in its fullness: so supreme knowledge can only flow from a vast, infinite mindfield. Within this transmission of wisdom, after a few generations, one comes to Angiras who is approached by Saunaka with great humility and respect. Swami Veda remarked that Shaunaka carries the surname, the ‘One of great Halls’, hinting at the fact that Shaunaka must have been a man of many possessions. This indicates that Brahma Vidya is open to all. Shaunaka asks his master the pivotal question of this Upanishad: “What is the one thing we have to know in order to know all?” Angiras replies by expounding on a theme that reverberates throughout many Upanishads: distinguishing lower knowledge from higher knowledge. Even the Veda’s are part of the lower knowledge. The higher knowledge (para) is akshara,’ that which cannot be destroyed.’ To be eligible for this wisdom, one has to be dhira: a Sanskrit term meaning wise and patient at the same time. (For the sages of old, it is impossible to be wise without being patient!). Swami Veda spent quite some time at explaining verse 8, the cosmological mantra describing the stages of manifestation. In ancient times, Vedic words had different meaning than nowadays. Tapas in verse 8 does not mean disciplined methodologies of meditation or purification. It is Knowledge. Anna is not food but a very subtle, undefined state of universal buddhi or mahat. In this way, SVB explained quite a few terms. Once again, we can see how we need the voice of a living master steeped in the tradition to unlock the secret of ancient texts. To give another example, the text provides us with two words to describe the knowledge inherent in Brahman: sarvajna and sarvavid. The first term connotes the knowledge of everything in its oneness, the second word is the knowledge of all possible divisions and differences. Swami Veda not only shared some jewels of his profound exegesis, he also grounded us in our meditation practice. He was never tired of reminding us about the necessity of incorporating 2-minute meditations throughout the day. When small children were brought to him, he held them close under his now legendary meditation blanket whispering sacred syllables into their right ear. One could see that they really cherished these blessed moments. He remarked that if children do not spontaneously come running towards us, we have made no progress in our meditation! The last satsang, shortly before lunch on the final day, was truly the apotheosis. The setting was perfect. The evening before, Swamiji had masterfully clarified all issues surrounding his upcoming seven years of verbal silence. In a certain way, he made all of us shareholders in his tapas. We left that room uplifted, inspired, consoled. Then on the last day SVB put the final touches to the guided meditation he has been building up over 4 days. Enveloping us in the clarity of his being, he allowed us to discover the chakra we were most resonating with. He advised to use this center as the focus point of our meditations. (CD’s of these advanced meditations are available, please don’t experiment on your own). In the lively talk that followed, he elaborated on the tantric wisdom from which these advanced meditations stem. He stated that by discussing these issues, he was actually commenting on the second canto of the Mundaka Upanishad in which the topic is fire offerings. The way to practice meditational fire offerings is an integral part of tantra. The tantras describe three ovals of light (lingams) at the navel, heart and eyebrow center. In our tradition, and at our level of development, these serve as the main points for dharana and meditation. Since our attention is already there most of the time and since we do not really know how to make the energies ascend, we do not concentrate on the two lower centers. However, in Kaula tantra they are included. Neither do we meditate in the Sahasrara chakra at the top of the head. By the grace of the master and the lineage, one has to learn first the pathways going from the Ajna center to the Sahasrara. These initiations belong to the highest level of tantra: Samaya SVB translated this term as ‘saha maya=with me’. At this level, the disciple no longer meditates, it is the guru who meditates within the disciple! Swamiji disclosed that there are ‘push and pull’ relationships between chakra’s. Lower chakra’s may push the energy upwards and higher chakra’s may pull the energy upwards. However, the best way is to wait until the energy is pulled up from above. These are only a few of the gold nuggets SVB shared with us. Swami Veda left us with the strong aspiration to explore the inner goldmine ourselves A last word about the organizationA last word about the organization: if one wants to see what Guru seva (service) looks like in reality, then just see organizer Willem Meijer in action. Like the proverbial Purusha from the Rig Veda, he seems to have a thousand eyes and a thousand legs. Untiringly and full of wit and inspiration, he was the motor that kept the entire event running smoothly. To Willem, Kries, Marilou, Ute, Sailesh and many others who shared their time, energy and skills: thank you very much for creating such a wonderful opportunity to learn and practice together!
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