SLOKA 124 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF GURU PROTOCOL?
Guru protocol, as outlined in the Kularnava Tantra and Guru Gita, defines the traditional ways of relating to one’s spiritual preceptor to draw forth his wisdom and blessings and fully understand his inner nature. Aum.
BHASHYA
Guru protocol can be understood in three parts: devotional acts, codes of harmony and prohibitions. Devotional acts include serving the guru, prostrating daily and offering a gift in love, chanting his name and meditating on his inner form as the embodiment of the Divine, partaking of uc�hishta–waters from his holy sandals, and his food leavings–emulating his awakened qualities, seeking initiation and striving for Self Realization as he directs. Codes of harmony include seeking his blessings, obeying his directions, keeping no secrets and honoring his lofty presence. Prohibitions include never contradicting or arguing with the guru, never criticizing him, nor listening to criticism by others, not imitating his dress or deportment, not standing or sitting above him, nor walking or driving ahead of him; not assuming authority in his presence, nor uttering words of falsehood or contempt, and not initiating conversation or asking questions unless invited. The Kularnava Tantra explains, ”Be always in service of the guru, ever in his presence, giving up desire and anger, humble and devoted, lauding in spirit, upright in doing his work.” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 124 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
RELEASING THE PAST
The older we get, the more memories we have, and those memories contain emotion–both positive emotion and negative emotion. Emotion takes many forms. We can have happy emotions, we can have sad emotions, we can have emotions of depression, we can have emotions of elation, we can have emotions of discouragement, we can have emotions of encouragement. As you go over your life, reliving it year by year, writing it all down from year one to the present, ten pages per year, you are the author of your own script. You are the star upon the stage of your own life. You may run into happy emotion, discouraging emotion, encouraging emotion. It’s good to get rid of it all. If you uncover a period of your life that makes you depressed, then you have been carrying that depression around with you for many, many years. Reliving the depression and the unhappy feelings as you write about the experiences in detail and burn the paper unwinds and releases the pranic emotional energy from each memory. You especially want to deal with the traumatic areas of the inner mind and release the discouragement, the regret, the depression, the loss of faith in humanity, the loss of faith in yourself and all those negative emotions that you’ve been carrying for so many years. They will go away like paper dragons. They will disappear.
You have three kinds of prana inside of you: spiritual, intellectual and instinctive. When you think, you make or cause a motion in that prana and create a form of prana. You speak, laugh, cry, think and interact with others; all this is the use and movement of one kind of prana or another, or a mixture of the three. In the inner mind, the subconscious pranic forms have a color and a corresponding sound when they vibrate with emotion, not unlike a Technicolor production. The purpose of this ancient tantra is to remove the color/sound from the memory pattern so that the memory would appear as a black-and-white silent movie when revisited, without the vivid, vibrating emotion. Your life, in moving and creating with the prana inside of you, can be like writing on water. An experience happens and it just goes away, without residue, without attachment, without lingering emotion. Or your life can be like carving in stone; each experience remains with you, embedded in memory by the impact of emotion. As you look back through the pages of your life, you want to melt the stone, break it up and make it go away. That’s the whole idea, regardless of what the motion is of the mind. The stones in your past are generally the surprise things that come along in life. Living a routine life–you go to work and you come home, and one day is pretty much the same as another–does not produce memories with emotions so much. But then you come to a major change, such as moving to a new home, or some new person coming into your life. That makes a big impact, and you have to deal with it. Like many people, you may deal with these things by packing them away: ”I don’t want to think about that anymore.” ”I don’t like that person” or, ”I like that person,” but you are married so you can’t like him or her too much; so you just pack it away and try not to think about it anymore. Those are some of the things you want to dig up and discharge, to break up the patterns.
Each of us has a story. You are the major actor on the stage of your life, playing the script that you wrote. You are the director and you are the lighting engineer, the stage manager, costume designer and make-up artist. When a particular experience or pattern of experience is repeated over a long period, it creates in the sub of the subconscious mind a latent tendency or propensity in that same direction. This is a vasana, which may be positive, shubha, or negative, ashubha. A negative vasana is like a subconscious motor that makes you do things you later wish you had not done. A positive vasana brings success and good fortune. Through the vasana daha tantra, we withdraw the energy from the memories, and in so doing weaken, even destroy, the pathways or vasanas that led us to the experiences that created the negative memories and leave in place the pure, positive vasanas that will continue to create a positive future.
SUTRA 124 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
NOT ATTENDING RITES OF PASSAGE
Siva’s traditional priests require that divorced and widowed followers protect auspiciousness by not attending rites of passage, except funerals. However, they may help with preparations and participate in receptions. Aum.
LESSON 124 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
BRING FORTH GOOD QUALITIES
Where do you get devotion? Not from the teacher. The teacher is only an awakener. He imparts knowledge to you, a vibration to you. He awakens you to the possibilities of the grandeur within yourself. Can a professor of geometry give you the total knowledge of that subject? No, he cannot. He can only show you the ways you can unfold the totality of the subject matter from within yourself. He gives you certain formulas and laws. You have to take them in and in and in where the solutions are.
How do we unburden awareness from the external areas of the mind through devotion? Our attitude has to be correct. Only in that way can we manifest the qualities that we want to manifest. Everyone has many different qualities and tendencies in his nature. Some are flowing freely. Others are suppressed. Others are repressed. Some are active and others temporarily inactive. Friends bring out the qualities and mirror the inner tendencies of each of us. When a person changes his life, he also changes his group of friends. It happens automatically. One group of qualities becomes inactive, and another group of tendencies begins to manifest itself in him. Our tendencies formulate our attitudes. Our attitudes, once consistently held, stabilize our perspective in looking at life.
The first step in unburdening awareness from the externalized odic-magnetic areas of the mind is to cause a bhakti, a love, a devotion, right within the nerve currents of your body. This is the first step. Get in love with the inner self. Begin to study the qualities of your nature, your tendencies. Write them all down on a piece of paper. Choose the ones that you wish to use and cross out the ones that you do not care for. Choose your qualities and tendencies as carefully as you choose your clothing.
Many people spend much time thinking about what they are going to wear. Hour after hour they are shopping in the stores. If you were to add up over a period of one year’s time the number of hours they stood in front of the mirror dressing the physical form, it would be quite surprising. How about the inside? Do we dress up the inside, too? We can, you know. Choose the qualities and tendencies to wear this spring and in the summer and fall, too. Pick carefully the smile on your face. Let it come from deep within. We can dress up the face in all sorts of ways, but the qualities of our nature are those which really shine through. We can paint over greed and resentment, but the quality of bhakti devotion and love will shine through all paint. It is its own decoration. Dress up the inside. Make the qualities and tendencies of your nature match the outside. You will be surprised. You will be keeping awareness hovering, in inner space, like the hummingbird over the flower, looking out at the material world and seeing it as a flower. This is one of the great duties on the path. Bring forth the great qualities of devotion through the yoga called bhakti.
