Conversations on the Convergence of Buddhism, Technology, and Global Culture

BG 207: The Tantric Cousins

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Episode Description:

This week we speak with spiritual teacher Sally Kempton. Sally was a student of the influential Hindu guru Swami Muktananda and taught in his lineage for many years. She shares with us her journey of first being introduced to Swami Muktananda, how she became a teacher, and why she shifted from being a swami to teaching in a more secular capacity later on.

During the 2nd half of the discussion Sally shares with us some of the history of the tantric non-dual system of Kashmir Shaivism, which is a close cousin to Indian Tantric Buddhism. She compares and contrasts the two systems, and also goes into detail concerning some of the crucial texts, practices, and philosophical tenets of the tradition.

This is part 1 of a two-part series. Listen to part 2, Secrets of Meditation.

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Transcript:

Vincent: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Vincent Horn and I’m joined today over the phone with a special guest, Sally Kempton. Sally, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with the Buddhist Geeks.

Sally: Such a pleasure.

Vincent: Yeah, it’s fantastic to have you on here. I think you’re probably one of the first guests we’ve spoken to that has a background not in Buddhism primarily but actually in Hinduism. So this is going to be a real treat I think for the Buddhist Geeks out there.

Sally: Yes, well I always love speaking to Buddhists as cousins in the spiritual journey, with very interesting differences in vocabulary and similarities as well.

Vincent: Almost like second cousins from a distant mother or something.

Sally: Right. Well of course both Buddhism and Hinduism came out of the same root so even though there’s been a lot of branching since those days. So still there’s a sense that we’re talking from the same basis, even though we’re speaking different languages, and have some central differences of course.

Vincent: Cool. Well hopefully that’s something we can into more because I think, especially from the Buddhist perspective, it’d be really interesting to hear what are those differences andwhat are the implications maybe even.

But before we do that I wanted to say a little bit about your background so the people kind of have a sense of what you do and where you’re coming from. Like I mentioned before you’ve practiced in the Hindu tradition for many years, many decades actually with Swami Muktananda whose part of the tradition, it’s called Kashmir Shaivism. And recently I guess in the last several years you’ve started teaching more, I guess a little bit outside of the tradition while incorporating facets of it and your more now kind of a spiritual teacher in that you teach meditation and you teach what you call “applied spiritual wisdom.” So that’s pretty fascinating that you’ve kind of moved beyond the tradition in a certain way, which would be maybe interesting to talk about that as well.

Also I wanted to mention that you have a new book that just came out through Sounds True called “Meditation for the Love of It,” which is a really interesting title for a meditation book I think. Maybe if you could say a little bit about why Mmeditation for the “Love” of it?

Sally: Sure. The basic premise of the book which is in some ways an introduction to meditation, but it really comes from… it came about in a point in my practice where I’d been meditating for a long time and one of the things that that I had discovered is that the real secret of meditation, of unfolding meditation is getting to love it. So, very often we meditate for a purpose. Perhaps in the beginning we get into it to feel better, which is certainly what I did. And if we go on we mediate for spiritual unfoldment, ultimately for enlightenment in whatever way we define that. But there’s another approach to meditation which doesn’t leave out the ones that I mentioned, but which you meditate because you are actually having a fabulous time exploring the inner world, exploring your own being, exploring your own consciousness. And for me a real turning point in my practice was recognizing that meditation is something that I did because I was in love with inner world. And the book is set up to help people come to that recognition, to that understanding. That meditation along with the results and benefits can be a profound recreational activity.

I’ve also found that, as we know, meditation makes its most transformational effect on us if we do it regularly. There was just a study which I’m sure you’ve heard about, which is in the Psychiatric Review, about how people who meditate for thirty minutes a day for a certain amount of time actually experienced positive brain changes. It’s the regularity, right, that does it. So it’s very hard to meditate regularly if you don’t like it. So at every level enjoyment is, I think crucial in your practice.

Vincent: That’s great. It’s so interesting when I hear you talk about that because although I’ve had that same experience in my own practice, when I first started, and I notice this with a lot of people, that starting meditation, it doesn’t feel enjoyable, usually, very much at all.

Sally: Right, it’s hard. You actually have to make a real effort to turn your attention around because, naturally our attention goes outward. So turning it inward is a very big deal. But, I have to say that one of the things that I like to emphasize with beginning meditaters is that they find a modality that exactly has some pleasure in it. So I generally teach beginning meditation by encouraging people to enter into the heart center, because the heart center, it very quickly yields a certain kind of joyful, almost sensual pleasure, so that when you’re meditating in the heart, even if you’re just doing a very simple breath practice or you’re practicing with a mantra or doing a mindfulness practice, when you’re centered in the heart there’s a level of pleasure in it that makes the practice much more juicy. So there are ways in which, even from the beginning, you can kind of fill your practice with some level of pleasure. And I think it’s important.

Vincent: Thank you. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you got onto this whole spiritual path, or maybe in some ways we could even say spiritual trip.

Sally: Spiritual trip, spiritual journey, yes, yes.

Vincent: Actually, I heard you in an interview with Tami Simon on her podcast
“Insights at the Edge” speaking about how you had a pretty profound experience with a Tibetan Lama and then soon after you met your guru, Swami Muktananda. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about that kind of introduction to the spiritual path or to these profound states of oneness that you talked about in that interview.

Sally: As with most people’s entrance onto the spiritual path, at least in those days, it was a much more of an out there thing to be a meditator when I started and there were very few avenues for it. But my initial experience was actually a spontaneous love download in my living room while I was listening to a Grateful Dead album. I was just completely overwhelmed out of nowhere with an experience of absolute, all encompassing, delicious love and it came along with a sense of, “oh my God, this is why people are alive. It’s not just to go through the day, it’s not to deal with their minds, it’s for this.” And what I then quickly discovered, the experience lasted about 24 hours, and then my normal state of somewhat neurotic, baroque, kind of self-analytical awareness came back.

I was a journalist and I was living a very typical, classic, downtown Manhattan journalist’s life. I spent a lot of time in my head. So it was at that point that I started meditating really in order to somehow close the gap between what I had seen was possible and what my actual day-to-day experience was.

And in pursuit of that I got involved in a western spiritual training and began to do a lot of very rigorous psycho-physical practices, including the form of hatha yoga, lots of visualization, a lot of multi-layered practice. And about a year and a half after that I went to a workshop with a Tibetan teacher in Berkley. And I was sitting in the workshop and he gave an instruction, which was something like, focus on the back of your head, and I was confused. I said, “you mean the inside of the back of your head or the outside of the back of your head?” And he said, “just find out who’s looking.” And in that moment I went into a state of spacious awareness, the ordinary mind retired, it was a kind of classic kensho experience. And again, that experience lasted for quite a while, several days. It completely changed the way I saw the world. As you know, if you’ve entered into one of those states, it really is an experience of the ordinary self retiring. Your relationships, the way you’re walking around is just kind of from a completely different place.

But what happened as that state started to fade was that I began having very powerful experiences of what I later came to realize was an awakened Kundalini. In other words, the practice that I’d been doing, which was an extremely specific inner-visualization practice, kind of taken from Vajrayana Buddhism actually, you imagine firey iron balls in the belly and then you bring the light up into the heart, and it was very, very specific and detailed, and hard. So once I had this awakening, those inner visualizations were not visualizations any more, they were actually happening. And I was having these upwellings of extraordinary bliss and insight an understanding. And then a kind of roller coaster started, which is also typical of a strong Kundalini awakening, in which all sorts of buried emotions would come up, anger and feelings of not liking myself. I remember I was doing daily Tai Chi at the time, and I was practicing push hands with my partner, and the anger that was rising was so intense that I actually had to stop doing push hands because it was just too intense.

In the middle of that I had a meditation in which, to put it simply, the top of my head just blew off and I was in a complete light field. It was both beautiful and scary and it made me realize why you need a teacher, and almost simultaneously, the name Swami Muktananda just came into my mind. He was on a tour of the West at the time, and some friends of mine had met him on a previous trip to the West. And I knew he was a Kundalini master. So when he came to Los Angeles, I went to see him, really, to get some advice on my Kundalini. And he had an extremely pragmatic attitude towards Kundalini, which again, at that time was very little understood in the West. The only thing that I had ever read about it was extremely scary book by Gobi Krishna about how his Kundalini awoke and went up the wrong channel and caused him years of discomfort. And what Muktananda explained was a position on Kundalini that actually comes from Kashmir Shaivism, which we’ll talk about later. Which is that the awakened energy is actually an expression of the divine energetic creative aspect of the universe, which in the tradition is called Shakti. And that when Kundalini awakens, what it actually does is take you through the process that’s necessary to literally clear out your body and mind, in order for you to know the vastness of who and what you are. In that sense, he put the whole thing in perspective for me intellectually. But at the same time, I was having around him a kind of constant experience of awakened awareness, of kind of vast universal awareness and tremendous love, and it just seemed like a no-brainer for me to start studying with him.

As I said, my first introduction to the deep traditions had been through Chogyam Trungpa’s work. And there’s a section in one of his early books in which he talks about the gurus of the Kagyu lineage, Tilopa and Naropa and Marpa and Milarepa. And he talks about the really antinomian, fiery qualities of these teachers, and how unexpected, what crazy wisdom teachers they were. And Muktananda, who was a very, very larger than life figure, and with an extremely powerful transmission that was both non-dual, being around him I would regularly and periodically go into just a sort of natural state of unity awareness, and also very heart-based. And he was also wildly fiery and interesting, very relational. So he was like one of those old gurus; he kind of fitthe picture of a guru that I had been, as it were, programmed to recognize.

So I entered into a relationship with him that went on until he died, it went on for about eight years. I traveled with him, I edited his books, I spent a lot of time with him. And in the process, he put me through a training in the texts of the tradition, and the texts of the yogic tradition, of the Vedanta tradition, and especially of Kashmir Shaivism, which was really just beginning to be known in the West at that time. The first English translations of some of the great Kashmir Sheiva works were just being published by, first, Motilal Banarsidass and then SUNY press. Naturally, Muktananda had been instrumental in having those books published. So my experience of spiritual unfolding in my time with my guru was actually as much about what those texts opened up in more as it was about closed eyed meditation itself. So that was how it started.

Vincent: Beautiful. And I understand that you were also teaching at some point as a Swami in that tradition, and then it seems like later on decided to drop the Swami title. Could you say maybe just a little bit about that, because I think that’s an important piece of information about your history?

Sally: Muktananda gave me initiation into Sanyas, just before he left his body. And he was very much interested in founding a cadre of teachers, almost based on the Ramakrishna order, which you may not be familiar with. But Ramakrishna was a great Hindu teacher of the late 19th century, and his closest disciple, Swami Vivekananda, was actually one of the key people in bringing Vedanta to the West in the early 20th century. And Ramakrishna, before he died, had given informal initiation as Swamis or monks, to some of his close disciples, and Muktananda had done that. And he really—how shall I say—he convinced me, he persuaded me, he made it clear to me that he wanted to do this and to continue teaching after he had left his body, so I did. He gave me the name Swami Durgananda, which means the bliss of the Shakti, the bliss of the divine mother. Durga is one of the names of the Goddesses in the Hindu tradition, as you probably know. And then I continued as a teacher in the organization, with his successor Guru Mai for another twenty years, so I actually spent almost twenty nine years in that mandala, and twenty of them as a swami and as a teacher, and traveled a lot, did a lot of of many many kinds of teaching, and a lot of teaching of these texts. I did a lot of courses in Kashmir Shaivism and its implications.

And then in the early ought, you know around 1999-2000, it began to be very clear to me that my path demanded that I actually get into let’s say a more ordinary relationship with my students. One of the things about being a swami, about being a monk, is that your in robes, you’re in a position that is essentially, not exactly cut off from, but very much apart from the people that you work and study with. And it seemed to me very important that I be living a life in which I was facing the same issues that people who have studied with me faced. Like how do you pay the electricity bill, and how you feed yourself, and how you deal with the ordinary interactions of the world. And also, when I first joined Muktananda, I had a very clear recognition that I was stepping out of the world in a way that I didn’t actually approve of. In some very deep way, I believe with all deep respect for monastic traditions, which I obviously received a lot from, but I really do believe that spiritual progress demands that we live in interaction with our society. So I had made a kind of promise to myself that I would not stay in that ashram situation forever, but that I would come back to my life. So it just was a kind of full circle unfoldment. Strangely enough, when I joined Muktananda, I had been living in Big Sur, California and I took a plane from the Monterey airport to Denver, which was where he was at the time. When I left the organization twenty nine years later, I took a plane from New York back to the Monterey airport to the place that I live now. So there was actually a very full circle quality about it.

Vincent: Very interesting. Going into what you mentioned several times, this tradition Kashmir Shaivism, I found it really interesting reading in your book that it’s a tantric, non-dual school that arose around the same time that tantric Buddhism was arising in India, like 7th – 13th century. And I wonder if you can say just a bit about the history and about the richness, you mentioned some of the texts of Kasmir Shaivism, because I think like you said this isn’t a tradition that many people are that aware of.

Sally: Yeah, well it’s interesting, Kashmir Shaivism is becoming more and more known. There’s a couple of generations of scholars who now study it, who’ve translated some of the obscure texts. And as tantra, as the practice of tantra becomes more and more popular in the West, certainly in the yoga world we I teach in quite a lot, tantra is very very much coming into prominence, not only among hatha yoga practitioners, but among people who are interested in the inner aspects of the yoga matrix.

So Kashmir Shaivism and the Vajrayana Buddhism seem to have arisen in the same area, I mean Kashmir was the center of Buddhism for many years, and in fact, there’s a lot of evidence that it’s the place from where Buddhism came into Tibet. For example, Naropa was from Kashmir, and Padmasambhava, Guru Rinpoche, seems to have been from Kashmir. And there’s also a tradition that Tilopa, the guru of Naropa, was actually not a Buddhist, but a Shiva yogi. He belonged to this very wild and interesting tradition of mountain wild-man yogis, crazy wisdom yogis, who lived out of doors, and lived in caves, and did deep practice, and had very very intense realizations of Oneness.

So there was always a cross-fertilization between Tantric Shaivism and Tantric Buddhism and many Buddhists in Shivites at that time lived in the same villages or in neighboring villages and near their temples and in Kashmir—not in Kashmir anymore of course, because the spiritual culture has been pretty much destroyed in the last 40 or 50 years—but in Nepal, there are temples that are both Buddhist and Hindu temples, and there are lots of deities in those regions that are invoked under the same name or under different names that are very recognizable as both Hindu and Buddhist deities. So it’s hard to say who took what from whom, but the lineages of Kashmir Shaiva teachers really began in the eighth century, and interestingly enough, the first known text of the tradition is called the Shiva Sutras, you might have heard of it. It means the aphorisms of Shiva. Shiva being one of the major deities in the Hindu pantheon, but Shiva in this tradition is also the name of the absolute consciousness, of the absolute itself. Shiva meaning “that which underlies.” That is Shiva being the ground of being.

The story goes, the myth about that text goes there was a sage named Vasugupta within meditation or asleep when he had a visitation from Shiva in a dream, and Shiva said go to a certain rock in Kashmir. It’s actually now in the town of Srinagar, and turn over the rock and you’ll find seventy seven sutras carved in stone. One of the reasons he gave us Gupta for reviewing this was that essentially the Buddhist practices have become so strong in Kashmir that people no longer understood—this is, of course, one of the key differences between Buddhism and Hinduism, and between Tantric Buddhism and Tantric Shaivism—people no longer understood that the consciousness that is the source of all is actually a Self. It’s a being. It’s a divine source. So in a certain sense, a text that came about as a kind of a download from consciousness itself or consciousness in this aspect, as a way of reminding people that the source of all is not emptiness, but is the fullness of a divinity that this tradition came to worship in a very devotional way, while at the same time recognizing the absolute non-duality between every single aspect of the universe from consciousness all the way down to the rocks.

So that text, in seventy sutras, they start with the aphorism in Sanskrit, “caitanyam ātmā,” which means the self, the atman, the nature of everything is caitanyam, which means awareness that is utterly free, completely capable of anything, which is innately blissful and innately creative. So, it essentially says who you are is free, blissful, pure, creative awareness. And the second aphorism says, “jñānaṃ bandhaḥ,” which literally means: the knowledge of particulars that blocks that recognition. So, as you see, this is very similar to the understanding of most of the non-dual traditions. What you are is consciousness itself, or pure awareness itself. And your ideas about reality, your concepts about reality, block you from seeing this.

From that beginning a lineage of teachers was formed who created a series of very profound texts, some of which actually deal with the energetic vibrational nature of the universe. And culminating in the work of one of the great geniuses of the Eastern traditions, Abhinavagupta, who lived in the tenth century and created a kind of powerful overview of all of the tantric traditions of his time. It was called Tantraloka, which means “the world of Tantra.”

So the way contemporary scholars characterize tantric traditions is that there’s a few aspects of it. The one which is central to my understanding, my experience, and my teaching—which is also essential to Kashmir Shaivism—is that tantra says that this world, this physical universe, is a complete manifestation out of the divine source itself, and therefore is not unreal. It’s not illusory. It’s not a dream, although it’s present in some states and not in others. But that every single particle of the physical world is at its heart made of this sparkling, blissful, energetic, awareness itself. So it’s a tradition that is utterly absolutely non-dual. The consciousness, the awareness at the source of everything condenses itself into varying degrees of density, and that’s what we call the world. So that’s a basic tantric viewpoint. That’s a basic viewpoint of the non-dual tantra. There are, of course, dualistic tantras.

But another of the characteristics of tantric practice is that it very much honors the feminine, which as we know, in the original traditions of both Hinduism and Buddhism, they come out of extremely patriarchal societies. And just as the Buddha wouldn’t give equal place to women practitioners, in the Hindu traditions women are considered inferior to men. The feminine is identified with illusion. The world is identified with illusion. The world is identified as Maya, which really means “veiling” or “illusion.”

So the tantrikas reversed this. The tantrikas said that “no, actually the world is shakti. The world is a manifestation of the feminine divine, the inseparable power aspect of awareness itself.” And the tantric tradition sees the feminine as actually the source of dynamism and creativity. There’s a famous tantric statement that “Shiva, the ground of being without shakti is no better than a corpse,” because it’s the feminine—it’s the power, it’s the manifesting creative aspect of the divine that gives it its fullness.

So Tantracism is non-dual. Tantracism honors the divine feminine very strongly. And Tantracism also is very much concerned with forming a relationship with Shakti with power, that literally empowers both the physical body and the spiritual body, so that one of the essential teachings of tantra is that there is no realization possible without gaining, without accumulating, and without expanding your capacity for holding spiritual power. And that, of course, is one of the things that Hindu Tantracism and Vajrayana Buddhism have in common. They are very much about identifying your own consciousness and even your body with divinity, with deities. So there’s a lot of deity practice in both Hindu Tantra and Buddhist Tantra. And diety practice the kind where you bring the qualities of a deity being of light into your own body. And in a sense, divinize your own body. The practice is very much about making the density of the body and the density of the mind subtler and subtler, so that you can begin to experience your identity with awareness itself, with consciousness itself.

And of course Tantra, especially the more dualistic forms of Tantra, is also concerned with ritual, there’s a lot of ritual. And also very concerned with mantra practice, with the practice of sacred sound. And again, those are both practices that are shared between Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism and the Hindu tantra.

So, the essential practice, the Kashmir Shaiva practice, that I was trained in and that most people agree is crucial to the tradition it’s called the doctrine of recognition. And the teaching here is a recognition that your consciousness, your I-ness, is a contracted form of the self of the universe. In other words, rather than getting rid of the ego or dismissing the I-sense as a concept, the idea is that you tune deeply into the I-sense and you allow it to expand, to show you what it really is, which is the universal I. That is to say, the teaching is that your “I”, when it becomes purified and perfected, will reveal itself as identical with the source of the universe itself. So the idea is not that you separate yourself from the world—although that happens—or that you separate yourself from the ego—although there certainly are stages in the process where that’s important and necessary. But instead you recognize what the “I” really is. That’s, I would say, one of the most radical aspects of Kashmir Shaivism. It’s one of the few traditions in the world that really unfolds that particular understanding.

Vincent: Cool. Yeah, thank you for giving some more detail about that, because when reading your book, that was definitely one of the things that struck me as being philosophically very different is the whole atman and anatman types of teachings. So it’s really fascinating to hear this kind of other side of the street, so to speak. It’s really neat.

Sally: Yeah. Yeah, well you know, there’s a joke in religious scholar circles that the Buddhists are always dismissing the Hindus as what they call tirtikas, tirtas meaning sacred places. They say that Hindus are always going on pilgrimages to sacred places and bowing down in front of deities. And Hindus dismiss the Buddhists, saying they get stuck in the void. They don’t go beyond the void. So of course both traditions willfully misunderstand each other, which is the way of close cousins often.

Author

Sally Kempton

Sally Kempton is known both for her ability to lead students into deep states of meditation, and for her gift of making yogic wisdom applicable to daily life. She has spent over forty years practicing, studying, and teaching meditation and spiritual philosophy. A former swami, or monk, she lived and studied for many years with enlightened Indian masters and received training in the Kashmir Shaivism tradition. She writes “Wisdom,” a regular column for Yoga Journal, and teaches workshops and retreats in the United States and Europe.

Website: SallyKempton.com