Who have you loved your whole life long?

 

I first came across the conception of the divine as Mother when I was 19 and I read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. It struck a deep chord in me that has never stopped reverberating.  

Maybe that is why, even though I had practiced zazen for 22 years and had never performed any kundalini yoga techniques, the life-energy ignited in me spontaneously when I was 41, while simply standing on my balcony musing about the divine. For several months, it took me on an irrepressible tour of the so-called "subtle body," and kundalini (or whatever one might call it) has been easily triggered to tangibly flow in my body-mind ever since. 

I turned to the study of kundalini yoga retrospectively to understand my own psycho-physical process. At the same time, I have remained grateful to my Western scientific heritage; that is, I have not abandoned the facts and metaphors of science in favor of the facts and metaphors of yoga, but have tried to glean the knowledge in both descriptions of reality.  

When I was 50, I took a graduate seminar in Tantra and Shaktism with the late scholar, Kathleen Erndl. She defined Shaktism as “the worship of Sakti, the primordial power underlying the universe, personified as a female deity who is the Supreme Being, the totality of all existence. As such, it stresses the dynamic quality of the deity as both deluding and saving power.” Shakti is both the power that deludes through identification with its endless forms, and the power that reveals the emptiness of all forms (and the mysterious identity of form and emptiness). 

Erndl explained Goddess theology as "a kind of monism in which matter and spirit are not differentiated but are a continuity subsumed within shakti, the dynamic feminine creative principle…Shakta theology understands sakti, identified with the Great Goddess, to be the ultimate reality itself and the totality of being.” 

The greatest gift that Shakta traditions offer us, in my opinion, is this vision of the unity of consciousness and world. Not the doctrine that reality is merely reflected in the universe, which makes of the universe a phantom, an illusion, a stepped-down imitation; but the intuition that Reality is being the universe, which enjoys the whole universe as the body of spirit, the incarnation of the Beloved. Put another way, the former view (expounded in Advaita Vedanta, etc.) generates a longing for return to reality (as if the purpose of life is to return to its source.) Whereas, in the latter vision, source is never absent, but only present. Therefore, there is already no dilemma, and we are free to love this. As they say in Zen, “Just this much.”

This brings to mind a Hasidic tale of a poor woodsman who fell in love with the King’s daughter when he came upon her bathing in a river. He declared his love to her with such passion and sincerity she was moved to tears. “Lover,” she said, “it is only in the cemetery that I will one day be able to join with you.” She meant, of course, that only in death could a princess and a woodsman become equals. Nevertheless, the young man, beside himself with adoration, took her words literally and went to the cemetery to wait for the princess to appear.

Day after day, as he waited, he thought of nothing but his beloved, contemplating her lovely form and qualities. This led him to feel grateful to her ancestors, who had made possible her birth, and to meditate on all the elements that supported her life. His appreciation expanded to include vaster spheres of being that gave life to the woman he loved, until, at last, it seemed to him that the One who was his Beloved was the very universe itself.

Kabir points to this understanding when he asks in one of his songs, 

“O tell me: Who have you loved your whole life long?”

Along these lines, Erndl wrote in Victory to the Goddess of “the worldview that the Earth itself is considered sacred and the (transcendental) deity embodies herself in earthly form.” She then commented, “This paradox defies distinctions between monotheism and polytheism, spirituality and materialism, ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions.” 

Seeing spirit as matter, and consciousness as inseparable from every natural process, it becomes easy to agree with Neem Karoli Baba’s saying: 

“The best form is which to worship God is every form.”