Mysticism

The Art of Learning

Accessing liberation through Knowledge

6 min read

Stillness & Flow are the two primordial polarities. Stillness is the Masculine. Flow is the Feminine. Mastering both can bring you to the sacred spot where primordial Oneness & Nothingness coincide.

Learning

In Hinduism1, the Feminine is deified as Shakti. All instances of Flow in the manifested universe are flavors of Shakti. A flavor of Shakti is Vidya. Vidya is a Goddess. The Goddess of Knowledge. Correct knowledge.

Whenever you study a subject, you are inviting the Vidya associated with that subject to flow inside you. As more of the Vidya flows into you, you become heavy in that Vidya. The Sanskrut2 word for heavy is guru3. Heaviness is a relative trait. If you encounter another who is heavier in that Vidya than you, then they are a Guru to you, as long as they remain guru in comparison to you.

The Buddha had many Gurus. Vidyas flowed into the Buddha from many Gurus, via beautifully intimate, tender student-teacher relationships. At some point, the flow would stop & the erstwhile Guru was no longer guru in that Vidya & the Buddha would make the heart-wrenching choice to move on, often declining offers to co-lead the student community of the Guru.

Not every human that refers to themselves or is referred to by others as Guru4 will be guru to you. When you can’t learn from a teacher, it’s not because you are a bad student or that the teacher is bad–it’s because there’s no Vidya that can find a channel of flow in your student-teacher relationship. So your work as a student is to open up your mind-heart-body to that Vidya & attune your sense to where the flow of Vidya into you is strong, so you may align yourself in that direction.

When the Flow is strong, there is effortlessness in acquiring knowledge. The words that you read will break beyond their physical containers made of paper & ink merging together into the Goddess to seep into your Being. You will feel nourished. Perhaps even electrified–the Goddess is a Shakti (energy) after all. Goosebumps. Everything you read will make “complete sense” to your intellectual mind without needing to “try to understand”. That’s how the Intellect worships the Goddess–by rejoicing in the arising of Sense.

By noticing softly, you may even experience an expansion in you. Spaciousness in your body. Because the Goddess is much bigger than you & you feel her expanse in the moment of identification with Her as She enters you.

Teaching

The Goddess loves to flow, though. And will feel constricted in your Body if there aren’t avenues for Her to flow from you to another, creating discomfort for you. So once you’ve “acquired knowledge”5, it’s your responsibility to transmit it. “Responsibility” is a *rolls-his-eyes* boring way of describing the experience of teaching or more accurately speaking, transmitting Vidya. Because when you encounter a receptive human who is laghu (lighter) in the knowledge that you are guru in, the Goddess comes alive in your being to flow6 into your (temporary) shishya (student, disciple). She is overjoyed to take another one of her children into her fold and in the moment of identification with Her, you feel Bliss.

The mandala or yantra (“divine symbol”) representing Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning, one of the 3 main Goddesses of Hinduism along with Lakshmi and Parvati, consort of Brahma, the Creator

Discernment

We currently inhabit Kali7 Yuga–the last of the 4 ages (yuga) that the Cosmos cycles through. An age of ignorance, widespread suffering & trauma. Trauma flows in ways that has similarities to the flow of Vidya, from one human to another. The difference is the absence of receptivity–of the Feminine–in the receiver. In Kali Yuga, our perception is cloaked under layers and layers8 of Illusion–Maya. In Hinduism, the top 3 Gods are Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Operator; Shiva, the Destroyer9. Vishnu, in charge of the smooth functioning of the Universe, is the Lord of Maya. Illusion is His divine creation, essential to the smooth functioning of the Universe.

In Jnana Yoga–the path of liberation through knowledge–we study to pierce through the layers of Illusion obfuscating our vision so we can see clearly. We can gain vipaschana–special, clear sight.

In Kali Yuga, many empty entities masquerade as “knowledge”, completely devoid of any Vidya, incapable of seeping beyond the intellectual realm of brain & speech into the mind, heart and body. Parroted by one adherent to another, incapable of bringing a student to the depth of embodied experience that Vidya provides. The widespread “lack of purpose” that is common in the West is because many are serving these empty entities for acquiring wealth that brings with it the Illusion of security.

My mentor, Dr. Robert Svoboda, has a beautiful essay that might help us all develop discernment to see past illusory knowledge flotillas that capsize with the smallest gust of wind towards true Vidya which can carry all to liberation. I read it in the introduction to his translation of the Shani Mahatmya.

In closing, I’ll link to an audio recording of me reading his essay. This letter was influenced by the Vidya-infused experience I had while reading it.

  1. Specifically, Shaivism which refers to Shiva-worshipping sects of Hinduism. The different Hindu sects share a similar underlying philosophy. “Hindu philosophy” is an umbrella term. A better technical term might be Sankhya (meaning “number, counting”) philosophy which forms the basis of Ayurveda, Jyotish, Yoga, but is (in my humble opinion) incorrectly misrepresented as “dualistic” because of silly dualistic intellectual attempts to classify between the “dual” and the “non-dual”. ↩

  2. I find the transliteration “Sanskrit” phonetically incorrect so I’m experimenting with using “Sanskrut” which comes closer to the correct enunciation of the word. ↩

  3. Apparently cognate with the English word “grieve”! Grief feels heavy! ↩

  4. … or Swami, Sri, Bhagwan (I find this one the oddest). ↩

  5. I put this in quotes because this common way of referring to knowledge has subtle colonial undertones. If you were to ask Daniel B. Quinn, he’ll tell you that the undertones go far back to when we, as a culture, started adopting settled agriculture as our primary mode of being, thereby establishing the need to “possess” land and thereby to “acquire” land. ↩

  6. Refrain from naïvely applying laws of physical nature like the conservation of energy to this transcendental experience. Although, I do wonder what, if any, mathematical laws might apply to the flow of Shakti. I don’t find it naïve to imagine that there could be a way of mathematically representing this because Mathematics has often been referred to as the language of the Gods. ↩

  7. Not to be confused with Goddess Kali (who’d be better transliterated as Kaali). The “Ka” of Kali Yuga is similar to the first syllable of “color”. ↩

  8. and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers and layers ↩

  9. An interesting side-note here that Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) only see God as the Creator. The Operator & Destroyer are absent from their conception of the divine. In a spiritual sense, this explains the growth & accumulation trap that Western culture finds itself in.

    Even more interestingly, Brahma used to be worshipped in India till early centuries AD, where he had a fall from grace (because he essentially tried to have sex with his daughter - Saraswati, and was beheaded by Shiva in the form of Rudra or Bhairav, depending upon the source) and is no longer worshipped in India. There remain only 2 temples of Brahma in all of India. The early centuries AD was also when the Abrahamic religions were established firmly with the adoption of Christianity by European monarchs by 4th century AD and the rapid rise of Islam in the 6th century AD.

    Note also the cognateness of Brahma & Abraham. And Saraswati & Saraï (Abraham’s wife). ↩

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