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Episode: Guardians and Protectors!
Author: Joshua Schrei
Duration: 02:31:46
Episode Shownotes
Practices of guardianship — invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries around ritual, communal, and personal space — are common to animate traditions across the world. In many traditions, guardianship is absolutely central as we navigate a world of forces, not all of
which are traditionally seen as beneficial. So traditional practitioners — even as they commune with the natural world — also draw clear boundaries, send wayward spirits fleeing, and even do battle with malefic energies. Such practices challenge modern western minds and are often dismissed as 'superstitious' or as the least important part of any traditional practice. They rub up against modern visions of a cosmos or a natural world that is 'all good', as they suggest the existence of things like malefic forces that are incompatible with a modern rationalist vision. So modern spiritualities forgo traditional understandings of guardianship and promote a vision of 'openness' within a universe that is 'all good.' Yet many traditions focus a lot of attention on closing, sealing, and directly establishing boundary. Even in non-dual traditions that see a cosmos ultimately beyond yes and no and good and evil, practitioners spend years establishing boundary, cultivating discernment, and invoking guardian entities. With the rise of modern freeform spiritual experimentation, people are invoking and inviting spiritual forces and navigating heightened states of consciousness often without any attention to guardianship. In such a time, when mental states are fragile and traditional safeguards are no longer in place, it can be important to understand what guarded space looks like personally and ritually. Guardianship practice needn't be complicated. It starts very simply, with offering and gratitude, and with how we navigate our own thoughts and feelings. Featuring conversations with Tantric scholars Dr. Ben Joffe, Dr. Hareesh Wallis, and Dr. Sthaneshwar Timalsina, author and Ayurvedic Doctor Robert Svoboda, sculptor Rose B. Simpson and activist Nadia Irshaid Gilbert, this episode dives deep into how traditional systems have viewed guardianship practice and its necessity in an age of spiritual free-for-all and excessive exposure to internet imagery. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.Support the show
Full Transcript
00:00:08 Speaker_04
Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald.
00:00:30 Speaker_04
All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hi friends. Good to be back after a long pause.
00:00:48 Speaker_04
And as some of you know, the reason that it's been a while since there's been a episode of the Emerald is because I had a unexpected family medical situation that came about and it required a whole lot of energy and attention from me and from my wife.
00:01:06 Speaker_04
And we had a lot to attend to and just wanted to let everyone know that all is well and our families well. and we're in good health and our little ones are healthy and doing great.
00:01:19 Speaker_04
And I appreciate for those who've reached out, I deeply appreciate the love and care that people have shown.
00:01:27 Speaker_04
It really warms my heart to see the degree to which this community responded and the words of support that came in and all the prayers and offerings and really thank you for it.
00:01:40 Speaker_04
Just so people who might be newer to the podcast know, I try to get episodes out once per month or once per five weeks. My ideal cycle is time to the lunar cycle, but there's a lot that goes into these episodes, as I think people can tell.
00:01:56 Speaker_04
And so once a month isn't always possible. I try to do reissues if it's not looking like I can get to an episode, but this was a special circumstance and so there was a bit of a bigger gap. And I appreciate your patience.
00:02:09 Speaker_04
This podcast is one in which I put a lot of care and attention to each episode and I hope that shows. And that also means that I'm particular about the quality of the episodes.
00:02:21 Speaker_04
Each episode is kind of like a standalone art piece, and I want it to be that. I don't want it to be just kind of regular commentary that's designed to, you know, keep people engaged every three days or week or so. That's not what The Emerald's about.
00:02:35 Speaker_04
The Emerald's about, you know, something a little bit more lasting and a little bit more particular in quality and flavor, and I hope that comes through.
00:02:44 Speaker_04
For those who are longing for more mythic talk and more interaction around these topics, I really recommend becoming a podcast patron because when, you know, it can seem like, oh, it's been a while since that last Emerald episode,
00:02:59 Speaker_04
well, we're having conversations through Patreon and study groups are happening, and we're exploring these topics together in cool, meaningful, deep ways.
00:03:09 Speaker_04
And so if you want more dialogue and you want more discourse and you want more content, a big archive of content at this point, then please consider becoming a patron.
00:03:19 Speaker_04
It's how I'm able to do this podcast full-time, and I depend upon the support of patrons like you to make this podcast happen. So you can find out more at patreon.com slash The Emerald Podcast.
00:03:33 Speaker_04
For those who've been wondering about the Small Grants program that I spoke about a couple episodes back, this is happening. It, too, got a little bit delayed with the unexpected circumstances in my life.
00:03:45 Speaker_04
But if you're a podcast patron, you will be seeing updated info about this program soon. It's a way of giving back to the larger community that is working with these mythic and animate topics.
00:03:56 Speaker_04
And this granting program, as well as some structural support for the podcast itself, are being underwritten and provided for by the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer recognizes the value of this podcast and reached out to me with a generous offer of support.
00:04:13 Speaker_04
And it's making a huge difference in the time I'm able to devote to the podcast and what I'm able to bring. So a lot of gratitude for Fetzer.
00:04:20 Speaker_04
And if you're interested in finding out more about the Fetzer Institute, you can check them out at Fetzer.org. They share a vision of applying spiritual solutions to social problems and of centering the sacred in these times.
00:04:35 Speaker_04
And these are times in which the sacred really needs to be centered. And this episode is about that a bit. It's a timely episode, given everything my family's been through in the past few months. It's been one that's been percolating for a while.
00:04:48 Speaker_04
And now, on with the episode. So this podcast, as I'm sure you've felt over the episodes, is about exploring deep synergies and commonalities in the animate traditions of the world.
00:05:03 Speaker_04
Looking at what has been foundational and essential in tradition after tradition. And one of the deepest foundations of animate practice the world over has to do with guardianship.
00:05:17 Speaker_04
With the understanding that the individual and the community exist within a world of forces, and there are forces greater than ourselves.
00:05:27 Speaker_04
And a big part of the human journey is the negotiation with these greater forces in order to keep this body, this consciousness, the community, the ritual space, the local ecology, sound and well-guarded.
00:05:48 Speaker_04
So, animate tradition the world over is full of guardianship practice.
00:05:56 Speaker_04
like cleansing practices, practices designed to establish boundaried space for rituals, practices invoking guardian spirits, the methodical acquisition of spirit help and spirit protection, anything from the simple burning of sage or kopal or brehu to clear a space, to elaborate multi-day rituals designed to dispel or keep unwanted forces out.
00:06:29 Speaker_04
And these practices in the modern West can seem, what, quaint? Outdated? Superstitious? They can seem to Western minds like the least important part of any tradition. You know, all that folk stuff. And why that is, is interesting in and of itself.
00:06:50 Speaker_04
Like, how many Westerners love Tibetan Buddhism for the psychological meditative aspect of it? but could really do without all this talk of guardians and nagas and worldly protectors and spirit kings.
00:07:03 Speaker_04
And yet, how saturated is Tibetan practice in guardian spirits? Mountain guardians, directional guardians, guardians in the wind and guardians in the clouds. Guardians and protectors, cry so many of the tantric practices. Come to my aid.
00:07:25 Speaker_04
Uphold your vow. It's not just Tibetan practice. It's the world over. The topic of guardianship brings up many questions. Particularly questions for modern minds.
00:07:39 Speaker_04
Like, is any attempt at guardianship simply humans seeking safe space where ultimately there is none? Is asking for great forces to come to our aid only a vain attempt to try to control the uncontrollable in some way?
00:07:54 Speaker_04
Does burning that Breo or that Palo Santo really shift something? Or is it just a little something that we do for us, and the cold, impersonal universe just goes on being the universe?
00:08:07 Speaker_04
Like, what of all those who ask for guardianship, but still have bad things happen to them? What of those who pray to benevolent forces and still suffer?
00:08:19 Speaker_04
And, of course, it is the basest of all understandings of guardianship to assume that it means kind of blindly asking for protection from the universe, and then if something bad happens, it's like, oh, look, told you, there's no such thing as guardianship.
00:08:34 Speaker_04
For guardianship, you could say,
00:08:36 Speaker_04
has always been about finding a larger attunement, an understanding of and a synchronization to greater forces and movements, to a mandala of living cycles, and understanding how to align one's life practice to these cycles in order to walk well in this world, as well as one can.
00:09:01 Speaker_04
to understand where we sit in terms of what we can and can't control, and to work to create healthy spaces of boundary and flow, to be in good relation with the larger cosmic forces that govern those things that aren't up to us at all.
00:09:22 Speaker_04
Mitigating karmic forces, one might call it from a Buddhist perspective, and one does it with everything from how one keeps one's house,
00:09:31 Speaker_04
to how one practices ritual, to how one interacts with the local ecology, to how one slowly, methodically architects one's own consciousness through practice, through how one walks, talks, eats, drinks, and even thinks.
00:09:57 Speaker_04
Guardianship is where all this animism talk actually gets really real, really quick, because it's about danger and caution, and about language that isn't all love and moonbeams.
00:10:10 Speaker_04
It implies the existence of things that religious-averse modern Westerners might not want to think about, like spirits, energies, and forces that may not have our best interest in mind. like unresolved ancestors or disturbed spirits of the terrain.
00:10:29 Speaker_04
And for some it's like, I was with you on all this animism stuff as long as we were talking about communing with waters and stones and humming along with the bees on hikes. But now you're talking about malefic forces?
00:10:44 Speaker_04
Like you're saying there's something in nature that we would need guardianship from?
00:10:50 Speaker_04
It's interesting how in the modern world we easily understand that in a densely populated world there are people with ill intent or neighborhoods we don't want to walk unguarded into and that in such a world it makes perfect sense that we would create shelter and boundary and not invite strangers in.
00:11:10 Speaker_04
But we don't afford the same intricacy to nature or to the spirit world. Modern romantic views of reconnecting to nature We often paint nature with a pretty broad brush, that we assume to be all benevolent. Or of one single intent.
00:11:29 Speaker_04
Or as a pretty backdrop, a vehicle for us to feel wonder again. And not of nature as it actually is. A forest rife with dangers and wonders. A circus of devouring marvels.
00:11:46 Speaker_04
And a lot of that probably has to do with the fact that we don't have a real relationship with the natural world. And by real, I mean, when was the last time anyone you know lost someone they love to a poison dart frog? Or to a fast river current?
00:12:02 Speaker_04
Or to a change in the weather? When was the last time our relationship with nature was complicated by the fact that nature, in all her beauty, takes things from us all the time? But this is what makes our relationship with nature real.
00:12:29 Speaker_04
The fact that it requires deep understanding, and work, and precision, and loving the very thing that will take everything from us. In other words, it requires actual relationality.
00:12:45 Speaker_04
And so it's fine and good to talk about animate forces as these beautiful, glorious abstractions, like breezes and passing reflections of light on water.
00:12:55 Speaker_04
But when you start talking about paying attention to a world of forces that are as distinct in character and motivation as human beings are, that's trickier. Because nature, in many, many, many traditional visions, includes devouring forces.
00:13:14 Speaker_04
Parasitic forces. Obsessive forces. Hungry forces. Sticky forces. Disruptive forces. Jealous spirits that would like nothing more than to see us fail.
00:13:25 Speaker_04
and proud spirits that feed off zealotry, and wailing ghosts seeking to pounce on porous hippies at grief rituals and use their melancholia to gain a somatic foothold in the material realm? You heard it here first.
00:13:39 Speaker_04
And if we look, the natural cycles we pass through cannot simply be categorized as all good. There are periods of what we might call bad luck that might befall a person. And there are stars and comets that forebode challenging times,
00:13:55 Speaker_04
And there are cycles when certain nations face certain configurations that aren't all good at all. Any quick glance at what the US has in store over the next couple of years from a celestial perspective?
00:14:08 Speaker_04
reveals that not everything in nature is saying, it's all love all the time. This is the reality of the world of duality and diversity and intricacy. And in the midst of these vast cycles, we are small and porous and fleeting.
00:14:28 Speaker_04
And carving out a life in this place means being in actual relation with a world of many, many variables. and it means a healthy relationship with what could be called boundary.
00:14:41 Speaker_04
It means saying no repeatedly, and keeping certain things out and paying really close attention to what we do and say.
00:14:52 Speaker_04
And this is where it ruffles postmodern feathers, because there tends to be a postmodern attitude, even among those who are wanting to reclaim animate spiritualities,
00:15:03 Speaker_04
Even when confronted with the undeniable fact that every single animate or indigenous or spiritual tradition on the planet has protocols and guidelines and initiatory steps and a big focus on conduct, there is often a subconscious attitude that the rules don't apply to me.
00:15:22 Speaker_04
I'm the exception, right?
00:15:23 Speaker_04
I get to waltz into as many ayahuasca circles with as many random strangers as I want because I'm a postmodern individualist who's seen that ultimately nothing really matters and all that guardianship is really mostly symbolic anyway, and saying I should or shouldn't do this or that is all gatekeeping and hierarchy and who are they to withhold my rightful experience of ecstasy and unmitigated freedom.
00:15:46 Speaker_04
And sure, we can say that we don't need these archaic practices of cleansing, or of sealing off, or of gathering wayward energies and locking them in a box, or dispelling them with salt, or light, or fire.
00:16:04 Speaker_04
We can say we don't need talismans or psychic armor, or a force field made of vocalized syllables, or an adamantine four-directional mandala of offering and of gratitude for the world around us.
00:16:19 Speaker_04
We can say we're doing fine without all these things, and then simply look around at the crumbling state of mental health.
00:16:28 Speaker_04
Look at the overt consequences on billions of minds of being exposed to a relentless stream of agitation with no boundaries set to mitigate that tide. And then tell me we don't need guardianship practices. Look at the state of the modern mind.
00:16:51 Speaker_04
And this is particularly acute right now as Westerners are longing for spiritual and ritual practice
00:16:59 Speaker_04
longing for reconnection to the animate, experimenting with ritual revival and summoning animate forces, and dabbling in potent shamanic spirit journeying surrounded by thousands of people at EDM festivals, opening up to all of it, taking powerful entheogens and questionable circumstances, and inducing deep ecstatic emotional intimacies, and for a lot of traditions,
00:17:23 Speaker_04
The way the West is approaching it these days would be seen as pretty precarious stuff. Traditional systems come with multiple layers of embedded guardianship.
00:17:35 Speaker_04
There are deeper safeties that are very different from safety from a modern psychology perspective, like knowing who you are and who your spirit help is, and knowing how to navigate your thoughts.
00:17:52 Speaker_04
And knowing, literally knowing, which way is east, which way is down, and which way is up. Connecting your heart and your thought there. Appreciating the world out loud. And offering something back. These are guardianship practices.
00:18:14 Speaker_04
And some would say we need guardianship practice most of all. More than we need to be taken into some 5 MEO bliss realm again where we gaze straight into the nature of 5th dimensional reality.
00:18:27 Speaker_04
Maybe we need to know what it means, from an animate perspective, to tidy up our rooms a little bit. To do some basic maintenance. Maybe we need to shed a little of the high performance wellness discourse.
00:18:43 Speaker_04
and walk with our head bowed, and say aloud to the powers, help us guardians, for I can't do it all on my own.
00:18:54 Speaker_04
Come to my aid, for there are windy and exposed passes in this life that must be crossed, and there are deserts of the heart, and there are shadows in which hidden forces are hard to see.
00:19:07 Speaker_04
There are currents and torrents that, were I to try to face them all alone, might sweep me away into agitated states. Come to my aid, for it is so, so hard to discern reality from illusion these days.
00:19:24 Speaker_04
It's so hard to discern reality from illusion these days. And there are days, O guardians, when I wander, At times I falter, there are times when I fear.
00:19:40 Speaker_04
There are days when I trust in creation and days when I tremble at the thought that those I love could be so easily swept away. Guardians and protectors help me walk a good road. And as the old song goes, don't allow traps to be set for me.
00:19:59 Speaker_04
Don't allow traps to be set for me. Guardians and protectors, this time on The Emerald.
00:20:10 Speaker_02
Oh
00:21:07 Speaker_04
In modern Western spiritual and psychological discourse, probably since the 1960s, there's been a pronounced emphasis on openness. Openness is an aspiration that many of us share, right? I want to be open. I want to have an open heart.
00:21:25 Speaker_04
I want to be open to the love of the universe. I want my partner to be open with me. And you can say this valorization of openness arose naturally
00:21:36 Speaker_04
as a reaction to a 1950s American culture that was closed, closed off from its emotions, closed off from feeling.
00:21:45 Speaker_04
And it arose along with a psychology discourse that understood that there are tangible problems that come with bottling things up, with being too closed, with repressing emotion and past traumas.
00:21:59 Speaker_04
And it also arose with the arrival of certain non-dual Indian spiritualities that promoted a vision of opening to a universe that is all one, and ultimately all love. So the goal is openness.
00:22:13 Speaker_04
If only I could be more open, that's the default way of being. It's all love, and I want to be open to it all. But in many traditions, openness is only part of the picture, part of the equation. For yes, human beings are porous. We have openings.
00:22:33 Speaker_04
We are literally hollow tubes. And because we are porous, things move through us. And so we are, in fact, open. And at the same time, not all that moves through us is something that we want to welcome in, which is why we also have boundary.
00:22:50 Speaker_04
Many traditions see that we need to take great care with what we let in to this porous vessel and what we keep out.
00:22:58 Speaker_04
Every individual consciousness and every body, every household and every community, every ritual space and every nation navigates this balance of what to take in and what to keep out. Because there can be problems with openness too.
00:23:17 Speaker_04
Say yes to everything, author and Ayurvedic doctor Robert Svoboda recently said in a conversation, and you'll end up dead pretty quick.
00:23:27 Speaker_00
Just think about the human system. Yes, it is open. There are various apertures. But if you want to survive, literally, if you literally want to survive, you have to be very choosy about what you put into your system.
00:23:44 Speaker_00
And if you became totally open to everything, I'm totally open to everything.
00:23:50 Speaker_00
And then what happens is there are plenty of things, all kinds of, you know, bacteria and viruses and fungi and what have you, that would be very happy to come in and turn you into lunch. Yeah.
00:24:02 Speaker_00
Your organism, it has to maintain boundaries if you want to exist.
00:24:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, treat the local McDonald's and the local meth dealer all as simply the shimmering play of a non-dual universe that exists to say yes to, and you may not be around very long. So ritual practice in many traditions doesn't just focus on openness.
00:24:26 Speaker_04
It focuses a whole lot on boundary, on guarding the body and the consciousness and the ritual space and the community. And in this process, openness isn't the only goal.
00:24:40 Speaker_04
Any gate, any juncture exists to let some things pass and to repel or deflect others. And so practice quite often isn't just about opening up.
00:24:54 Speaker_04
It's about having a well-functioning, well-guarded gate that can be open to what it needs to be open to and closed to what it needs to be closed to. says Sanskrit Acharya and Tantric scholar, Dr. Stanislawar Timosena.
00:25:10 Speaker_10
So the basic belief here, the basic idea is that your body needs to be shielded. And this is basically Kavacha, meaning a shield. This is basically a process of shielding by the energy. And there can be many energies, you know.
00:25:27 Speaker_10
and there's like a Nyasa the installation and the Nyasa is many form like deities but at the same time mantra the seed syllables and so on so on and all of these are necessary in this paradigm I'm talking about from the Hindu paradigm of your body being equal to a mandala you need to install the same deities that are installed in the periphery of the mandala
00:25:50 Speaker_10
So that your periphery of the mandala, that is your body, is safeguarded. So you can go very calmly to the highest state of meditation, no problem there. This is how it works.
00:26:03 Speaker_04
In Afro-Brazilian traditions, the guardian, Eshu, is called the opener and closer of the path. The one who has the keys and the locks, and therefore negotiates and facilitates all the flows in and out.
00:26:20 Speaker_04
There at the gateway, I'll leave my sentinel, says one hymn to Eshu. There at the gateway, I'll leave my sentinel. I'll leave Seu-Tranca-Huas taking care of the gate. That means the Lord who closes and opens the ways.
00:26:36 Speaker_04
In these traditions, there are a whole range of practices that are directly known as sealing off or closing. And this closing is seen as a good thing.
00:26:48 Speaker_04
Quote, during festivals, the members of Marakatujibakisotu groups feel exposed to various types of illnesses caused by the envious eye, the onyogaranji, of their rivals.
00:27:02 Speaker_04
This motivates them to accomplish a number of defensive practices, both in the symbolic and in the aesthetic dimension. In order to perform safely, they need to close the body, fechar o corpo, physiologically, symbolically, and aesthetically.
00:27:19 Speaker_04
In this context, the expression closed body is synonymous of a protected, powerful, healthy, invincible body, while the expression open body
00:27:31 Speaker_04
refers to a vulnerable one, susceptible to the attacks of negative entities, aroused by the enemy's envious eye." So, that's interesting, right? We have a lot of associations with the word guarded or closed.
00:27:47 Speaker_04
So a closed body being seen as positive and open body being not so positive might shake up that view a little bit. The word guarded sounds what to us? Closed off, repressed, overly contained.
00:28:04 Speaker_04
We think that if we're guarded, we aren't experiencing life in the universe to its fullest. We think that if we're guarded, it means that we'll somehow be less sensitive.
00:28:15 Speaker_04
And this is where we need to look deeper, maybe, into the structure of the natural world itself. At animals whose protective horns and quills are also organs of feeling. The narwhal's tusk, the porcupine's quills, the ram's horns, the deer's antlers.
00:28:36 Speaker_04
These are both how they protect and how they feel at once. And the fact that they are guarded means they feel more. Plant structures in nature show no dichotomy between open and guarded. The Hawthorne bush, a course participant, reminded me recently.
00:28:58 Speaker_04
That beautiful heart medicine comes with really long spines. It's open and sensitive and colorful and radiant and guarded and rooted and defends its space all at once. Every rose has its thorn, I've heard it said.
00:29:17 Speaker_04
And do those thorns make the rose any less sensitive? Or do those fine pinpricks become places where the rose feels more deeply? The stirring of air around. attunes more deeply to the minute changes in the shifting balance of the local ecology.
00:29:38 Speaker_04
So being guarded is a good thing. It's a f***ing crazy world out there. It's good to be guarded.
00:29:50 Speaker_04
Everything in nature has its porosities and its boundaries, and our bodies and our houses and our communities are places to practice the deep spirituality of yes and no, of the beautiful balance of openness and guardianship.
00:30:11 Speaker_04
So light the fragrant resin smoke, and circle the house with rosemary and rue, with Espada de São Jorge.
00:30:20 Speaker_04
Adorn the perimeter with plants pungent and sharp with thorns, to keep a well-guarded house with clean corners and strong, bright borders, and an eye of blue and white glass to reflect any unwanted stares, and a fierce guardian right at the front door.
00:30:39 Speaker_04
For, oh, great guardians, sometimes I look down at my children sleeping at night, and find myself wanting nothing more than to make a circle there, an infallible perimeter, a boundary of whispered words by candlelight, a circle of adamant and diamond lullabies to keep the tides of a devouring world at bay.
00:31:05 Speaker_04
And how I would give anything to be able to make that circle strong, and to keep them safe, and to keep the house well. The house. Why do traditional animate systems put so much emphasis on the house? A lot of animate practice happens in the house.
00:31:31 Speaker_04
I mean, what could get into the house? What do we need protection from? On a physical level, it's pretty straightforward, right?
00:31:41 Speaker_04
We live in homes that have walls so that we can mitigate the flow of bugs and beasts and poisonous serpents, of inclement weather and exposure to danger, of brigands and conmen and swindlers. You don't want just anyone walking into your house, right?
00:31:59 Speaker_04
I don't. When I lived in the backwoods of Rio Uribe County as a teenager, the sign on the barbed wire perimeter fence read, no drunks, no thieves, no liars. Pretty clear. That's the obvious stuff.
00:32:15 Speaker_04
We don't invite deeply unsettled or precarious people into our homes if we feel they could do us harm. People invite precarious, unsettled digital forces that can do them harm into their lives all the time. But that's another story.
00:32:31 Speaker_04
So the guardianship of the house is pretty obvious stuff. But the house is more than the house. The body is a house. The heart-mind is a house. The consciousness is a house.
00:32:48 Speaker_04
And we're often much less discriminating about what we let into the abode of consciousness, for example, than we are with our material houses. For this world is full of forces. This world is populated, teeming with forces.
00:33:07 Speaker_04
If you're going to talk animism, you have to be willing to talk about spirit forces. About a world more populated by the unseen than the seen.
00:33:17 Speaker_04
Have you ever been to a place, a canyon for example, with a group of people, and all of a sudden, more than one of you started feeling disturbed at the same time? Felt a sense of foreboding or anxiousness at the same time?
00:33:34 Speaker_04
Ever considered that anxiousness is not localized in one body? That emotions are territorial rather than personal, as Bayo Okomalafe says? I live by the ocean now. There's a lot of moody people here. That moodiness is a geographic phenomenon.
00:33:53 Speaker_04
It's all that wind and water churning here in the middle of the ocean, this way, that way.
00:34:00 Speaker_04
There are currents of anxiousness and moodiness sparked by geography that are prone to make a person unsettled, just as there are swamps of stagnation that can drag people down into the muck for decades.
00:34:13 Speaker_04
There are energies that push on us and that pull, that welcome us in like a lantern fish only to gobble us up.
00:34:21 Speaker_04
In 99% of global tradition over time, we have to recognize these forces have been seen and understood and categorized and interacted with and spoken of and passed on in great, great detail.
00:34:36 Speaker_00
People cannot imagine how many things are out there looking for hosts. Things that you would never think of, like memes and emotions and dead people for sure, and deities and semi-deities, semi-hemi-demi-deities, but also just little weird
00:34:55 Speaker_00
alignments of chi, of prana that have gotten created, sometimes in some geological way or sometimes in some other kind of way. They're kind of like storms, really. They're available to take people over too.
00:35:11 Speaker_00
And it's like you go out there into the world and you assume that you know what's going on. You make yourself available to everything. And then you end up with some weird situation and you wonder what happened.
00:35:24 Speaker_00
You wonder because you have not been paying attention to the fact that you should have been paying attention to what was going on. My experience with people who have been possessed by lower
00:35:35 Speaker_00
categories of spirits is, once they get in there, it's really, really hard to get them out. And they're lower categories of spirits. It's not like they've come in to be parasitical.
00:35:45 Speaker_00
They haven't come in to have some sort of symbiotic, mutually productive relationship.
00:35:52 Speaker_04
Right. There is such a thing as, like you're saying, lower categories of energies and spirits that can be parasitical on the human system.
00:36:02 Speaker_00
Absolutely, seeing it again and again and again.
00:36:05 Speaker_04
Yeah, and that's something that I think it's, you know, worth reminding the kind of neo-spiritual world of that, you know, just because they're spirits doesn't mean that you want to be open to them, right?
00:36:17 Speaker_05
No, no, no, no, no.
00:36:19 Speaker_04
There's whole categories of spirits that you don't want to be open to. And not all of these forces are malefic by any means. Many of them are just doing what nature spirits do. And in enacting their own intricate agendas, we are taken along for a ride.
00:36:37 Speaker_04
Sometimes a terrifying ride, sometimes a beautiful ride. Possession can be beautiful, too.
00:36:43 Speaker_04
For example, did you know that there's a particular class of possessing god, possessing celestial force, detailed in a 12th century Tibetan text called the gyu-ji, or four medical tantras?
00:36:57 Speaker_04
whose possession symptoms include that they make people say overly spiritual things and stare off into space with a smile on their face all the time. As tantric scholar, Dr. Ben Jaffe says.
00:37:09 Speaker_11
So it says, it says more specifically, if you have a spirit provocation that's connected with light, like the celestial deities, it says the patient or the sick individual will speak in Sanskrit. or they'll like to chant in other sacred languages.
00:37:30 Speaker_11
They will say or sing pleasant sounding or spiritual words or songs, which also kind of is understood to mean that they They'll have a kind of toxic positivity as well.
00:37:39 Speaker_04
You're describing the yoga world.
00:37:41 Speaker_11
Yeah. They have sublime, expansive, positive-looking faces or expressions all the time. Beautific expressions. It says that they will fast. They'll love fasting. They'll be drawn to spiritual locations and people that love to wear white.
00:38:00 Speaker_11
They'll enjoy wearing prayer beads. They would like to visit waterfalls or mountains or houses in high airy places. It's basically all of Bali. It's like every Australian in Bali.
00:38:14 Speaker_04
You can see it all over Instagram. You can see the class of possessing deities taking over an entire yogic subgroup on Instagram.
00:38:21 Speaker_11
Yeah, these are still sansaric beings with their own agendas who have a vested interest in keeping those individuals where they want
00:38:32 Speaker_04
possession and porosity. For some, this might sound like the most outlandish stuff ever. But is it outlandish to say that right now, in close proximity to you, there's a luminous presence that can take hold of your attention and refuse to let it go?
00:38:48 Speaker_04
Can grab you and gnaw at you and start to change your ideologies and your basic values? So that before you know it, you're losing friends and blowing all your money and your whole state of mental well-being is in question?
00:39:01 Speaker_04
That might sound far-fetched, right? Except it's not far-fetched at all. It's as close as your phone. Consciousness is porous, and there are many forces at play.
00:39:15 Speaker_04
And this is simple math for anyone who understands this to be a universe of vibration that operates according to harmonic laws, which it is. in a vibrational pattern C of nearly infinite combinatorials.
00:39:31 Speaker_04
Of course there are disharmonies and disruptions and vortexes that draw us in. Just as a note of discordant music set free from a bassline melody seeks harmonic resolution, so there are obsessive energies, hungry energies, wayward energies.
00:39:49 Speaker_04
Some places are rife with what you could call unresolved energy. So traditional systems define dozens upon dozens of categories of possessing entities. and the influence that they can have on the individual, unguarded consciousness.
00:40:07 Speaker_04
It's a really entertaining read for those who want to go down the Tibetan or Ayurvedic or traditional Chinese medicine, medical rabbit hole. There are thousands, literally thousands of types of possessing entities that can mess with human systems.
00:40:22 Speaker_04
There are seemingly unlimited categories of nature spirit in the Indo-Tibetan systems alone. Gandharvas, Yakshas, Apsaras, Kinnaras, Garudas, Rakshasas, Nagas, and on and on. We exist in constant negotiation with terrestrial and elemental entities.
00:40:44 Speaker_04
And these forces can become disturbed, and we need to know what to do with disturbed or wayward energies. To be an animist, in so many traditional visions, is to be a negotiator who treads relational spaces with greater powers.
00:41:01 Speaker_04
Says tantric scholar Dr. Harish Wallace,
00:41:05 Speaker_01
And why do you need to negotiate? Because from a traditional point of view, humans don't own land. They don't own anything. Ownership is a mental construct created by humans, right? The spirits of the land own the land because they are the land.
00:41:23 Speaker_01
They're inseparable from the land. And so we are always temporary tenants, as it were, in their land. So that's why we need to negotiate with them.
00:41:35 Speaker_01
And there's another reason that the practitioner might be concerned about this, especially if you're doing tantric practice or shamanic practice, any powerful practice. If the practice is working, it's going to generate shakti.
00:41:49 Speaker_01
It's going to generate more energy, more power. And the more power you generate, non-corporeal beings are drawn to feed off that power, like animals in a dry region come together to drink from the pool.
00:42:04 Speaker_01
And so these non-corporeal beings are not necessarily malevolent. Sometimes they are, it's just like humans. Some wanna help you, some wanna mess with you, and most don't care about you.
00:42:16 Speaker_01
But they're drawn to the power, even if they're not malevolent, and wanna feed off it.
00:42:21 Speaker_04
So land spirits, in the Tibetan animist vision, are literally called landlords. They are forces to whom we must pay rent.
00:42:32 Speaker_11
Even in the early Indian Buddhist community, there was an understanding that every monastery had relationships with specific Nagas and Yakshas, even to the point that
00:42:45 Speaker_11
Nagas would, because they come in all flavors, you know, some Nagas are very pious, some really love to maliciously harm humans, or are very vindictive.
00:42:55 Speaker_11
I mean, the main reason they're vindictive is because of this Indian and Tibetan understanding that they precede us. You know, Tibetans literally call territorial spirits sabda, shibda, which means like landlords, literally.
00:43:09 Speaker_11
They're the ones that we should be paying rent to all the time.
00:43:12 Speaker_11
But there was a very strong understanding in the early Buddhist community that monks had a special responsibility to be in good relation with yakshas and nagas around the new monastic communities.
00:43:29 Speaker_04
Paying rent is a form of guardianship. And what does paying rent mean? Offering back. Singing back. Chanting back. Giving food back. Appreciating out loud. Because everything likes to be appreciated, remember?
00:43:50 Speaker_04
Recognizing out loud that we are part of a relational web. and honoring the role that each being plays in that web. Some call this building a network of spirit help.
00:44:08 Speaker_04
Before she dies, Vasilisa the Beautiful's mother entrusts her child with a little doll. Feed this doll every day and everything else will work out from there, she says. And so that's what Vasilisa does.
00:44:24 Speaker_04
And when she encounters situations beyond her control, she feeds the doll. And soon, little birds and little mice flock to her and help her with seemingly impossible tasks.
00:44:37 Speaker_04
Because she fed and offered and appreciated and recognized what she could and couldn't control. And took the time to build relational help. That's guardianship.
00:44:51 Speaker_04
The fairy tales are stories of spirit help, of stones and sprites that feel respected and honored and acknowledged, and so become part of the protagonist's mandala of relationality.
00:45:05 Speaker_04
The mandala of spirit help is architected through trials and tribulations, through moments of gratitude and appreciation, through momentary pauses and deep breaths that serve to connect.
00:45:20 Speaker_04
Right now, the guardianship traditions teach us, spirit help is available. And the good news is, there are guardians everywhere.
00:45:33 Speaker_04
For just as there are countless combinatorials of disruption and disturbance, so there are countless guardian energies that bring resolution to that disturbance. Some might say that there is a corresponding guardian for every disruption.
00:45:48 Speaker_04
Just as in the Indian traditions, every psychocosmic imbalance, every rogue ashura, generates in response its own shakti, its own complementary energy that fits it as snugly in the overall harmonic design as a T-cell fits a pathogen.
00:46:08 Speaker_04
And so the sea of guardians to draw upon in traditional animate visions is vast. Vastness itself. is a guardian. Connecting to vastness, when we're so caught up in the immediate churnings of our minds and our lives, is a guardianship.
00:46:28 Speaker_04
Take a moment, pause, connect to the vastness. Do you feel the guardianship that comes? Just with that, just with connecting for a moment to the vastness. There's a 17th century Tibetan text that is literally called The Ocean of Guardians.
00:46:57 Speaker_04
The liberation stories of the great ocean of oath-bound protectors. And you've seen this ocean of guardians. It's all around. Snarling outside Japanese Shinto shrines.
00:47:12 Speaker_04
wide-eyed and mustached above the doors of houses in South India, gracing the walls of churches and chapels with swords and scales. You've seen guardians patrolling the world, in the microbiome, in the pH balance of tree bark.
00:47:30 Speaker_04
In the architecture of cell walls, specifically designed to navigate that precious balance of what to let in and what to keep out. In the kaleidoscopic tracks of the Nyungar protector animals.
00:47:46 Speaker_04
In the monkeys at the perimeter of the Kali Temple, gnashing their teeth. Guardians.
00:47:54 Speaker_04
Animate traditions envision a host of billions upon billions of guardians, ranging from benevolent, altruistic angels to beings who are often pretty fierce themselves.
00:48:07 Speaker_04
Because sometimes, if you need to get rid of a fierce energy, you need an even fiercer energy to do the job. Sometimes, if my kids are being really chaotic, There's a particular volume that my voice has to reach in order for them to snap out of it.
00:48:25 Speaker_04
Like me, in my earlier life, when I was acting stupidly, there was a certain tone the universe had to take with me before I would listen. You know what I mean? We need those fierce guardians, too.
00:48:40 Speaker_04
And the fierce guardians are many, and often their stories are painful. Often they are tales of blood and fire and long roads to redemption. Medusa, who served as a guardian deity in ancient Athens and beyond, has a horrible story.
00:49:00 Speaker_04
Palden Lhamo, the guardian protectress of Tibet, began her journey as a wild forest spirit named Ramati, married to the demon king of Lanka.
00:49:12 Speaker_04
She bore him a son, and both the king and his son were determined to eradicate Buddhist practice from the world. They enacted a great genocide, but Ramati had become enchanted with Buddhism and its doctrine of compassion for all beings.
00:49:30 Speaker_04
She pleaded over years with her son to stop his wanton destruction, his burning and his killing. But he would not. So she made a terrible choice.
00:49:43 Speaker_04
She slayed him, her own son, and drank his blood so that it would not be used to generate more malefic forces. And she flayed him and made of his skin a saddle for her white mule. And she rode away from Lanka forever.
00:50:01 Speaker_04
Her enraged husband sent a volley of arrows her way, and one struck the backside of her mule.
00:50:08 Speaker_04
Remati healed the wound, and as she healed it she spoke aloud, May the wound of my mount become an eye, large enough to watch over the twenty-four regions, and may I myself be the one to extirpate the lineage of the malignant kings of Lanka,
00:50:31 Speaker_04
Let's feel into that one again. May the wound of my mount become an eye large enough to watch over the 24 regions. And sure enough, an eye opened on the mule's hindquarters where the wound had been.
00:50:49 Speaker_04
And so, all the many wounds we suffer become eyes that watch over the realms of our lives, do they not? Do not the places of our rupture become the places we see far. And so we are guarded right where the universe asks us most urgently to open.
00:51:42 Speaker_04
It's good to have eyes on your back, too. That's guardianship. Sometimes you need fierce guardians who roam the periphery of the mandala. in the places where, as Ben Jaffe says, things are bloodier and the bones crunch a little more.
00:52:08 Speaker_04
It's good to have beautiful, angelic beings and healing forces that radiate love and light, but in many traditions, It's also helpful to have the forces that can deal with really unruly spirits and with gritty situations.
00:52:24 Speaker_04
The battle-tested warriors, the hitmen, the gutter cleaners. As Ajmir Barbosa says in Livre Essencial Jimbanda, quote, in general terms, in human societies, for example, there's a tendency to value doctors and not value garbage collectors.
00:52:44 Speaker_04
However, both professionals are extremely important for maintaining the health of each individual and the community. In spiritual terms, the Esquerda undertakes the heavier tasks of policing and protecting and energetic cleansing.
00:53:00 Speaker_04
In anonymity, Eshús and Pombajíres, this class of guardian spirit, act as doctors, counselors, psychologists, protectors, fulfilling multiple roles that can be summed up in one word, guardians.
00:53:15 Speaker_04
When incarnated, they often had difficult lives as bohemians, prostitutes, and cabaret dancers, experiencing violence, aggression, and hatred. They are agents of light working in darkness.
00:53:29 Speaker_04
Practicing charity, they execute the law under the guidance of their chiefs and in the name of the Orishas. they should be treated with respect and affection, much like one treats friends, and not with fear.
00:53:44 Speaker_04
They take responsibility for fallen spirits, act as karmic debt collectors, combat evil, stabilize the astral plane, sever harmful influences, undo black magic workings, assist in spiritual cleansings and the work to remove obsessions and obsessive spirits, and guide spirits with detrimental vibrations
00:54:06 Speaker_04
toward the light or towards specific environments in the lower astral, aiming for their rehabilitation and evolution." Yes, sometimes we need those who are willing to dive into spaces where no one else wants to go, and to take on battles for us.
00:54:25 Speaker_04
Battles that we may not be able to fight ourselves, but like Vasilisa and her little doll, if we feed the right spirit helper, they take care of the rest.
00:54:37 Speaker_04
So it's a nice, idealized, hyper-sanitized vision of shamanism that the shaman is in this beautiful, symbiotic relationality with the natural world that looks like singing to the trees and rocks and streams with open arms and that's it.
00:54:54 Speaker_04
And the shaman is in symbiotic relationality, but that relationality looks a lot different than we might imagine. It involves serious negotiation with serious forces, forces that can bring disease and disruption and even death.
00:55:09 Speaker_04
It involves constant ritual mitigation and a willingness to journey into precarious places, into the spirit world where the raw winds blow and devouring forces are many.
00:55:23 Speaker_04
Sure, it involves offering songs of appreciation, but it also involves setting spirit traps, ransom offerings, ritual slayings. The Shaman's Toolkit is not all peace and goodwill, not all openness.
00:55:40 Speaker_04
There is an element of what can only be described as battle. One look at the somatic posture at the bodies of shamans after years of shamanizing reveals a glimpse of the toll of this battle. It's not simply singing to the mountain.
00:55:59 Speaker_04
It's an ongoing psycho-spiritual throwdown.
00:56:05 Speaker_03
You want the battle?
00:56:36 Speaker_04
So shamans and spirit practitioners from Tibet to Siberia to the Amazon don literal and imaginal armor and weaponry in their work with spirit energies. The armor and weapons employed are not metaphors.
00:56:52 Speaker_04
They are made, constructed of sound, of luminous mind stuff, of incantation, of pattern. The practitioner architects a mandala citadel of consciousness, and that citadel blazes and radiates, even as it is guarded at every gate.
00:57:14 Speaker_11
The Mandala is the king in the fortress. You're invested with implements of power. You're literally coated in armor. You're anointed as a king or a queen and presented with weapons. And you're told, you never have to be scared ever again.
00:57:32 Speaker_11
That's what Vajra means. It means fearless. It means that no harm can come to you.
00:57:38 Speaker_04
Tibetan spirit tamers use tridents and daggers, bells and drums, horns and trumpets to call spirits but also to send certain spirit energies fleeing. The Congolese spirit negotiator uses iron nails. The Siberian shaman's cloak is covered in daggers.
00:57:58 Speaker_04
The Amazonian maestro uses darts and shields. Prehistoric shamanic tunics are embroidered with hundreds of rattling elk teeth. The teeth make a sound. The clacking rhythm wards off malevolent energy. The enamel on the teeth shines.
00:58:17 Speaker_04
That flash wards off malevolent energies too. Shamans take a liking to mirror shards, to jagged patterns, to anything that resembles eyes, to anything that can be utilized in the precarious dance of energies in which we need good defense.
00:58:37 Speaker_04
So in Brazil they sing, I am dressed with the clothes and weapons of St. George. So that my enemies having feet will not reach me. So that my enemies having hands will not touch me. So that my enemies having eyes will not see me.
00:58:53 Speaker_04
Not even with thought can they cause me harm. Firearms will not reach my body. Knives and swords will break without touching my body. Ropes and chains will break without tying my body, for I am dressed with the clothes and weapons of St. George.
00:59:14 Speaker_04
People don't always like to use spiritual battle analogies. They can sound a little war-like, right? Like, isn't the problem that we've seen things as a battle for so long?
00:59:26 Speaker_04
But there's an element to the journey of life that can only be described as a battle.
00:59:32 Speaker_04
if we're unwilling to see the battle that's taking place, the conflict of duality that can't simply be addressed by saying, let's just all focus on the oneness and love part. then we're possibly missing what love actually is.
00:59:50 Speaker_04
I love my kids doesn't mean I love them as idealized expressions of a detached oneness. It means I love them through the really difficult navigations of yes and no, through the cuts and scrapes and tears and the drives to the hospital.
01:00:11 Speaker_04
I love you, my son, there curled up in the back seat on that drive to the hospital. I love you. I'm here for every bittersweet negotiation in this joyous, porous battleground called life.
01:00:30 Speaker_04
If you don't think that this existence is a battle, I don't know. Take a drive through East Vancouver, past the specter of dozens of people bent over almost to the ground from fentanyl. Look at what fentanyl is doing to the global body.
01:00:45 Speaker_04
All those bent souls, people who were too open to something they shouldn't have been open to, who were unguarded. And now there are years and years of consequence to mitigate and some won't survive at all.
01:01:00 Speaker_04
Any addict knows that there is a spiritual battle at play in the universe. And our society is addictive. And addictive forces are literally battling for control of your mind right now.
01:01:13 Speaker_04
There are scores of people with billions of dollars in backing behind them using battle terminology to talk about your mind, and your eyeballs, and your attention, and how to grab it.
01:01:26 Speaker_04
And if we think there's no battle, and nothing to defend ourselves against, and just effortlessly slip into hours of phone time because It's all good, and it's all energy, and all energy is just like other energy. We're not paying attention.
01:01:44 Speaker_04
So this is interesting, right? Because there can be a tendency in modern adoptions of non-dual tradition, of it's all oneness, to say things like, ultimately, there's no such thing as the battle. There's nothing to defend against.
01:02:01 Speaker_04
Out beyond conceptions of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. Some have translated Rumi as saying, I'll meet you there. It's a really nice thought to meet in that field. But that field isn't where we spend most of our lives.
01:02:20 Speaker_04
That field is a state of consciousness that we access in deep ecstatic and meditative practice. while the day-to-day negotiations of existence are full of yes and no, of conflict, of attraction and repulsion, a festival play of dualistic navigation.
01:02:42 Speaker_04
To experience Rumi's field, that place where all merges into the place of no subject, no object, is vital and essential.
01:02:53 Speaker_04
but it's generally accessed in a ritual space that is meticulously guarded by a practitioner who has spent years architecting their own consciousness and their own navigation of dualistic space through commitments and vows and guardianship practices.
01:03:11 Speaker_04
a practitioner whose daily existence involves navigating a world of relational forces and saying yes to some and no to others. Non-dual tantrikas, historically, weren't simply basking in states of all-oneness.
01:03:27 Speaker_04
They were in the streets, and the forests, and the charnel grounds. actively involved in spirit negotiation every step of the way. They were deeply embedded in a relational ecology that assumed the reality of benevolent and malevolent forces.
01:03:46 Speaker_01
What a lot of people, I guess, don't realize is that, you know, in the average village or town, the tantrika was the guy that you would call to help you negotiate with the local spirits.
01:03:59 Speaker_01
Like that's that was the main function for many people of like, why would you even talk to this person? because they know how to talk to the Nagas and the Naginis, like the serpent spirits around the perimeter of the village.
01:04:11 Speaker_01
And if they're not happy, nothing's going to go right. But even if we scale up to the great tantric masters like Abhinavagupta, like people imagine he was something like a magisterial, saintly figure, without a doubt in his daily life,
01:04:31 Speaker_01
He was doing all the shamanic things and the protective things, and he was an awakened being and a liberated being, right?
01:04:38 Speaker_01
So he was moving in this world fluidly with not a sense of separate self, just this is the dynamic play of forces and energies, and he's engaged in it. But even such a high-level Tantrika was never removed from this world.
01:04:56 Speaker_01
So it's like people have gotten such a distorted and westernized picture because of course there are tantric lineages that have as a key teaching everything is the one consciousness, the one divine consciousness and all of that.
01:05:12 Speaker_01
But also from a tantric point of view, negotiating the world of powers and forces is indispensable. Whereas realization of the absolute nature of consciousness is dispensable.
01:05:25 Speaker_01
It's like if you were going to lose one thing, you would lose the vision of the absolute and stay with the ability to negotiate with forces because that's everything. It's everything in our embodied existence, you know.
01:05:39 Speaker_01
And so only some tantric teachers are saying, because they realized, oh, this is all a play of one fundamental consciousness.
01:05:45 Speaker_01
But that was not as central to the tantric tradition as forces and powers and energies and their manipulation, which is like a dirty word in English, but manipulation in a good sense, learning to work with the forces and powers.
01:06:02 Speaker_04
Navigating the world of forces is everything.
01:06:06 Speaker_11
And I think a lot of people, they take the intellectual rapid digestion of that concept and they go, I never have to worry about bad things again. There are no bad things, but that's just gaslighting yourself.
01:06:22 Speaker_11
If you read the biographies of all the great saints and Tibetan masters, before they reached this kind of Atiyoga, all good, you know, accepting everything, everything flowing through you, kind of feeling but not attaching.
01:06:39 Speaker_11
Before they reach this kind of point, many of them go through constant, they're beset constantly by negative, demonic, derailing forces constantly.
01:06:55 Speaker_04
Some of the most exalted masters of non-dual tradition deal with spirit negotiation and even spirit affliction their entire lives.
01:07:05 Speaker_04
Dzogchen master Namkhai Norbu, who spent years expounding teachings on the great primal ground of reality, beyond concept or form, beyond yes and no, was plagued for years by a spirit who he disturbed as a child.
01:07:20 Speaker_04
He heard about a fearsome spirit that lived on the roof of a castle, and he went there one dark and stormy night.
01:07:27 Speaker_11
He went in there like a kid might do, so poked his head and he banged on the thing and he said, oh, big gobble, you're so scary. What are you going to say to that?
01:07:37 Speaker_11
And immediately he started having these kind of Freddy Krueger-esque dreams where this spirit appeared as a monk and just absolutely terrorized him. Threw a spirit dart at him, which hit his leg and then turned into this kind of
01:07:55 Speaker_11
physically visible, festering, sore. He developed all kinds of strange disorders. And this particular being is of a family of spirits who really has an axe to grind for humans. There are some spirits who just hate human beings.
01:08:11 Speaker_11
They hate them because they used to hold sway over things. They used to be kings. And then we took over the earth. We took all their stuff. We denied they exist.
01:08:24 Speaker_11
There are some spirits who rightfully are so self-righteous and their favorite thing to do is to produce religious extremism and self-righteousness in people. They produce the same qualities in people.
01:08:41 Speaker_04
So the actual living practice of tantric non-duality in context was deeply concerned with navigating the whole mandala of being and beings.
01:08:53 Speaker_04
And the entire foundation on which it stands is an animist vision of territorial forces and ancestral spirits, water beings and wayward energies that demand our attention and our thorough loving relation.
01:09:09 Speaker_04
I think quite simply, a lot of people don't understand that in non-dual traditions and, you know, Tibetan Buddhist traditions, even in Buddhist traditions that aren't tantric, the assumed reality presence and importance of spirit beings, nature spirits, spirits of place, Nagas, like all of these things form.
01:09:30 Speaker_11
It's so much assumed as a basis of as the ground of reality that like I think that people miss it because it's so assumed.
01:09:41 Speaker_04
Yeah. And the presence of potentially possessing entities is assumed too.
01:09:49 Speaker_11
and entities that are actively hostile to Buddhists deeply understand and have always paid attention to the fact that there just simply are in existence whole classes of spirits whose favorite thing to do is thwart
01:10:09 Speaker_11
spiritual growth and produce spiritual narcissists who think they're enlightened when they're not and end up becoming like very dangerous individuals. There are like whole categories.
01:10:21 Speaker_04
Modern Westerners who don't have that basic relational architecture that comes through years of offering and interacting and negotiating and singing to and holding feasts and festivals for spirit beings and ancestors
01:10:39 Speaker_04
might encounter a tantric text, like the Fragmentary Tantra from the Age of Munsuk Gelpo, that says that all spirit beings are just the shimmering play of consciousness without any inherent substance to their existence.
01:10:54 Speaker_04
And they might think that this means that these spirit beings are not real, or that the negotiation of animate forces is somehow secondary, or not a concern at all.
01:11:06 Speaker_04
The immediate reaction might be, oh, this is saying that spirit propitiation, spirit negotiation isn't important because it's all just the play of consciousness.
01:11:17 Speaker_04
And then zoom out the camera a little bit and understand that this text is a text precisely on how to propitiate disturbed nature spirits that exists within a culture whose orientation is around the reality of these spirits.
01:11:32 Speaker_04
And that all the chapters preceding this quote are all about technique after technique to work with spirits. And then you understand the assumed context is one of the absolute tangible reality of spirit energies and their effect on the human system.
01:11:50 Speaker_04
And they're as real as anything else is. As real as the need for your house to have walls, or you to eat, or the fact that you don't go around feeding tigers out of the palm of your hand.
01:12:02 Speaker_04
And so holding the ultimate view is simply one piece of the puzzle in working with forces whose negotiation is pretty much how we will spend our lives.
01:12:12 Speaker_04
And it's best to focus a whole lot of time and energy on how we navigate the actual interplay of dualistic forces than to try to skip all that in favor of trying to dwell in the high view all the time, which no one actually does.
01:12:35 Speaker_04
The reason I'm going so deep into this non-duality piece is that it's emblematic of a tendency that postmodern Western minds have that tends to leave these postmodern minds unguarded and open to a whole range of mental and emotional affliction.
01:12:52 Speaker_04
And that could be called skipping all the context stuff, skipping all that foundational practice stuff. I don't need to painstakingly architect the mandala of guardianship in my life. I'm going straight for the juice.
01:13:07 Speaker_04
Straight for the highest yoga tantra. Straight for the 5meo carnival ride. Straight for invoking the deepest, wildest deity because I'm wild.
01:13:17 Speaker_04
I'm free, and me being free to do whatever I want and explore any state of consciousness I want, without any thought of protocol or boundary, that's what spirituality means. but you can't tear down the mandala if you haven't built it first.
01:13:33 Speaker_04
The fundamentals of learning to architect consciousness so it can work well within this sea storm of forces, the fundamentals are really important.
01:13:43 Speaker_11
This is why I wonder whether it might be better if people focus more on the quote-unquote worldly shamanisms which they so quickly disparage to rush to the non-dual view
01:13:55 Speaker_11
It might be better if people spend more time with the person-to-person animist point of view, if only to get a more flexible but durable sense of their own self, you know, to weather the flow, the currents of emotionality.
01:14:11 Speaker_04
So, I'm not suggesting that everyone become sorcerers or spirit negotiators, or spend a whole lot of time thinking about endless classes of disruptive spirits that might be messing with them. We don't need more to worry about in this day and age.
01:14:26 Speaker_04
What I'm offering is that in an era of deep sociocultural, ecological, and mental-emotional disturbance, it can be really helpful to study how traditional systems have understood what leaves our consciousness open to affliction and how to defend against it.
01:14:44 Speaker_04
And quite simply, the psychological and meditative systems we've adopted, the wellness models and the mindfulness models, miss a whole range of very simple, very tangible ways of working to guard the gates of these body-heart-minds.
01:15:03 Speaker_04
Beyond the free-form meditation we do, or the therapeutic processing we do, do we spend time architecting the basic structures of consciousness and relationality? that can keep unwanted agitations out.
01:15:20 Speaker_04
For traditionally, guardianship is found through a whole context, a whole systemic mandala of relationship that begins at birth or even before birth.
01:15:34 Speaker_04
There is guardianship in being born into a particular clan, in knowing one's totem and the roles and responsibilities that come with that clan totem right from the start.
01:15:45 Speaker_04
There's guardianship in the ongoing rituals that are part of fulfilling that role. There's guardianship in the ritualized alignment to the solar and lunar cycles. There's guardianship in prayer and devotion.
01:15:58 Speaker_04
And when I say there is guardianship, what I mean most fundamentally is that all these things help keep individual minds and hearts anchored, connected, and within relational context, which might be as good a definition as any for sanity.
01:16:15 Speaker_00
Part of this, at least in traditional Indian culture, is implicit because there was an expectation that you would have And I'm speaking extremely generally now, but there's an expectation that you would have a Kula Devata, a family deity.
01:16:32 Speaker_00
So you would grow up worshiping this family deity. So right there, you have this deity in your house, and the deity is doing part of the job of keeping the things away as much as possible.
01:16:45 Speaker_00
Now, the degree to which you and your family are actually aligning with the deity, of course, is a different matter, but at least There's the potential right there.
01:16:54 Speaker_00
And if it really is a family deity, it's one that's been passed down from one generation to the next. And so there is continuity and continuity is very desirable.
01:17:07 Speaker_00
So that's one thing and the second thing is you have this festival calendar and you have on certain days you fast and on certain days you have a puja, you know, an organized ritual worship and on certain days you chant a bunch of different hymns and things like that.
01:17:25 Speaker_00
You have a structure that keeps encouraging you even if it's for a few minutes a day
01:17:31 Speaker_00
But it keeps encouraging you on a regular basis to connect to the parts of the astral world that you want to connect to, that are useful for you, that are going to be beneficial for you.
01:17:43 Speaker_00
And it's good to remember that all of these things in the astral world, they're getting fed by our attention. They're getting fed by the prana, by the life force that comes from our attention.
01:17:53 Speaker_00
So if you want something good to happen and to have a protective effect around you, you have to actively put some kind of attention on having protective things around you, whatever they may be. The more you put attention on it,
01:18:09 Speaker_00
The denser that thing is going to become in the astral world and the greater positive inertia will be present for it to assist you in keeping the space around you intact and unviolated.
01:18:23 Speaker_04
Let's pay attention to what the good doctor is saying here. There's guardianship in the repetitive architecting of something through ritual repetition.
01:18:33 Speaker_04
There's guardianship in the close, loving relationship with a deity that is developed intimately over time. That rhythmic work crystallizes. It gains integrity over time. Integrity isn't a concept.
01:18:51 Speaker_04
It's when the relational architectures of your practice start to crystallize in the heart field around you. In the absence of this, we modern Westerners find ourselves in the perfect storm.
01:19:09 Speaker_04
The lack of totem or clan structure, the lack of regular ritual alignment to larger cycles of nature, The lack of attunement to anything greater at all in a world in which humanism reigns.
01:19:23 Speaker_04
The lack of acknowledgement of relationality with the surrounding ecology. A modern life which burdens us as individuals to figure everything out on our own.
01:19:33 Speaker_04
Which leaves us unable or unwilling to call upon the network of relational guardians that exist all around us.
01:19:39 Speaker_04
The stresses of this modern life which drive us to anxiousness and isolation and exhaustion, combined with a literally constant stream of consciousness-altering, emotion-inducing content that pours into unguarded minds.
01:19:54 Speaker_04
And yet, since we have little understanding of porosity or of altered states of consciousness, we have little awareness of when we are switching between waking life and deeply suggestible hypnotic states.
01:20:07 Speaker_04
All of this leaves the modern individualist extremely unguarded.
01:20:13 Speaker_00
I think it's fair to say it is unusual and I believe fairly recent that people have come to the conclusion that you can have a self that is really walled off and that it is healthy to individuate yourself completely away from everybody except yourself.
01:20:33 Speaker_00
And of course, one thing that this does is definitely minimizes The degree to which external things, astral or otherwise, can come in and affect you. You are then inside this locked compound with all of your own pathologies.
01:20:55 Speaker_00
This has not saved you from mental illness. It's saved you possibly from being easily possessed in the conventional way of thinking about possession. But you still can easily be possessed by any major emotion, greed, lust, anger, fear,
01:21:13 Speaker_00
disgust, whatever, you can be possessed by any meme, any mind virus, capitalism, communism, fascism, whatever it might be.
01:21:22 Speaker_00
And it will be easier for you to be possessed by those because they will give you the impression that this is something that you personally have thought of and therefore you have concluded that it's accurate and therefore we see all kinds of people going down all kinds of weird rabbit holes because they are not paying any attention whatsoever to anything other than
01:21:43 Speaker_00
the dictates of their own mind and whatever the fake astral world of the internet is telling them in whatever echo chamber they happen to have fallen into.
01:21:56 Speaker_04
So the danger, as it's articulated in many traditions, isn't just that random wandering spirit energies might take hold of you with no warning.
01:22:05 Speaker_04
In the classical Tibetan and Ayurvedic medical vision, there are mental and emotional states that make us more open to spirit affliction.
01:22:13 Speaker_04
So you have thousand-year-old texts that speak of the danger of spending too much time alone in a state of anxiousness. Too much time in the grip of obsessive thought. Too much time in states of fear. Sound familiar?
01:22:28 Speaker_04
These texts could be describing the average modern mind in a post-industrial world. Excessive guilt or shame. Excessive fear at the state of the world. Excessive worry about how things are going to turn out.
01:22:41 Speaker_04
These are all spoken of as factors that can leave one open to affliction. Disruptions or disturbances in the mental and emotional field become areas of potential affliction. So guardianship is about deeply tending the mental and emotional field.
01:23:01 Speaker_04
Which is kind of all a way of saying, if you want guardianship, start with your own thoughts. If you really think about it, beyond any external dangers we might face,
01:23:17 Speaker_04
A whole lot of the trouble we encounter in this life comes to us through our own thoughts. I know my thoughts got me in trouble at various points in my life. How about yours? So, yes, there are external dangers.
01:23:31 Speaker_04
And yes, for some populations those dangers are much more present than for others. But beyond external circumstance, many of the dangers a person faces in life comes to them through the vehicle of their own thoughts.
01:23:45 Speaker_04
And this is where a person can burn all the sage and palo santo they want, do all the lesser and greater banishing rituals, invoke all guardian and protector deities they want, but if they're not seriously working to alchemize the thoughts they think, well, good luck with all the palo santo.
01:24:06 Speaker_04
There are a whole range of external protection measures that one can employ, says the Atarakita Sutta, up to and including surrounding oneself with war elephants, that still leaves one unprotected because they are only external protections.
01:24:23 Speaker_04
Whereas if there is internal protection, Through thought, through word and deed, one will be protected. Internal protection. Constructing the contextual architecture necessary to not fall victim to deeply unsettled and precarious mental states.
01:24:44 Speaker_04
Having some facility in how we handle the thoughts and feelings that pour through us. This is where the guardianship stuff gets really real, really quick.
01:24:57 Speaker_04
Which is why Tantric yogini Machik Labdron, the great spirit negotiator herself, born to a mother who dreamed while pregnant of a blue-black guardian goddess who cut her chest open,
01:25:12 Speaker_04
removed her heart, fed it to the local goddesses, and replaced her heart with a humming white conch shell.
01:25:21 Speaker_04
Machik Labdron, who was called the singular mother torch, who offered to and interacted with spirit entities her entire life, who tamed demons and ghouls and fed her own imaginal body to the devouring entities of the cremation ground,
01:25:38 Speaker_04
This is why Machik Labdron said that the possessing entity that one has to be the most concerned about is that entity called self-identification with thought. you know, that tendency to think that we are our thoughts.
01:25:54 Speaker_11
This is what Machik Labdron teaches. She says demons exist on the outer level as karmic debt collectors and hostile predatory spirits going about their business. But the most demonic thing is conceptual thought.
01:26:08 Speaker_11
So attachment to self and conceptual dualism is the mother demon. Being a scared, doubtful, hyper-conceptual or highly emotional person makes you more likely to become obsessed All emotions, all pleasures, they are like a mini possession.
01:26:31 Speaker_11
The sign of spirit attack is this sort of hyper-conceptuality, fearfulness. And people don't understand. It's not just frothing at the mouth and writhing in the bed and being angry and violent.
01:26:46 Speaker_11
It's also, as we said, being possessed by an emotion, being unable to separate your observing awareness from even a feeling of great compassion or self-righteous spirituality can also become inflating.
01:27:02 Speaker_11
And different types of spirits, as we said, primarily what they do is they remove you from a stability and a centeredness in your basic nature.
01:27:13 Speaker_04
And this is where I think it's really important to contrast those modern identity-centric psychological or therapeutic models in which individuals are encouraged towards what you could call ownership of thoughts, ownership of mental and emotional states.
01:27:29 Speaker_04
To contrast that with animate visions from Tibet, to India, to West Africa, to Brazil, that tend to have a vision of thoughts and emotions as forces that co-emerge territorially, geographically, ancestrally, ecologically, and move through us.
01:27:47 Speaker_04
And we don't own them. We filter them and we decide which ones to feed and which to allow to move right on through.
01:27:56 Speaker_04
So the modern model that says that absolutely everything that we think and feel is valid, and not only is it valid, it's property, it's ours, this is simply not how a whole lot of traditions have seen it.
01:28:10 Speaker_04
In this world of yes and no, of porousness and boundary, there are thoughts or feelings that we want to welcome, and thoughts and feelings that we might want to say goodbye to pretty quickly.
01:28:25 Speaker_04
I know full well, I've lived with myself long enough to know full well that there are feelings that arrive to me at like 9 o'clock at night after a long day when I'm totally exhausted that aren't feelings that I need to consider sacred or valid or give any attention to at all.
01:28:46 Speaker_04
Those feelings are best dealt with by getting my ass to sleep and waking up with a different mindset the next morning.
01:28:54 Speaker_04
Because if I were to indulge every single feeling of grouchiness or resentment that arises with tiredness at the end of the day, I could really unsettle my life really quickly. So some feelings, it's best to just put away until the morning.
01:29:11 Speaker_04
There's deep value in processing thoughts and feelings. But there's also such a thing as stewing in process. And stewing in process is a recipe for attracting sticky forces. And then those forces will love nothing more than if we just stew some more.
01:29:30 Speaker_04
They're feeding off the soup, you get it? With every action we are feeding something. And the more we shine the overly therapeutic magnifying glass on the darkest places of our own being,
01:29:44 Speaker_04
and get really into the endless dredging process, the more little sticky creatures are going to absolutely love what's being dredged up and are going to be like, yeah, keep feeding me that. I love it. Mind if I invite a few friends?
01:30:01 Speaker_04
And this is where everyone's going to be like, oh, there goes Josh bashing psychology again. And that's not where I'm coming from. I'm not saying don't do the deep work.
01:30:10 Speaker_04
I'm saying as we do the deep work, careful of over-identifying with it and getting lost in the vortex of it. Because a big part of the deep work is clearing, right? And that part can get forgotten. Remember clearing? Clearing is guardianship.
01:30:30 Speaker_04
Clearing the ritual space with salt or sweet grass smoke. clearing the consciousness, clearing the emotional field. In many traditions, we want to clear sticky, addictive feelings out. E-motion, right? Literally, to move outwards.
01:30:50 Speaker_04
We have to remember the whole clearing part in an age when every single feeling is owned and celebrated as sacred and is seen as an inextricable part of our identity and therefore rehashed again and again.
01:31:05 Speaker_04
I think, I hope, that everyone who listens to this podcast knows the value that I place on feeling. Feeling as an antidote to modern numbness. Feeling as a return to a heartful relationship with the world. Feeling as a necessary awakening.
01:31:24 Speaker_04
As the vehicle through which our relationship with the living world will be repaired. Feeling as our ancestors did, through their pores, through nostrils and fingertips and foot soles and open eyes.
01:31:44 Speaker_04
This doesn't mean that every single feeling is to be welcomed, just as not every animate force should be invited into the ritual circle or into our homes. We can feel what we need to feel, and we can also let it go.
01:31:59 Speaker_04
We can track it to its root where it has something to offer us. We can listen to its story. And we can be careful not to get addicted to that story. And when the time is right, we can let it go. It's up to each of us to navigate this.
01:32:17 Speaker_04
I'm simply pointing at things that traditional systems have tended to see as precarious. And of course the response comes, well, these are precarious times. Of course we're all unwell. Of course we're falling apart. Of course we're unguarded.
01:32:32 Speaker_04
The world is unguarded and so shall I suffer along with the world. That's a beautiful thing to say. It's quite Christian, really.
01:32:41 Speaker_04
But in a time when we are facing what you could call global mental collapse, it's also important to understand the value of having guardianship practice.
01:32:50 Speaker_04
as articulated by so many animate systems, so many spiritist systems, that will tell you that care for the individual vessel, especially in precarious times, is more vital than ever.
01:33:04 Speaker_04
For in such times of collapse, traditional cultures have called on guardianship practices, on clearing and cleansing and practices of establishing boundary, even more. We need you now, even more. opener and closer of paths. We need you now even more.
01:33:24 Speaker_04
We need you even more winged protectors. Sharp beaked protectors. Protectors with piercing spirit eyes. Great Garudas that patrol the skies and see everything that transpires. We need your vigils. Armed protectors, guardian kings of the four gates.
01:33:48 Speaker_04
We need your swords of discernment. Help me navigate the confused world of modern monetized pseudo-spiritualities with clarity. That's one we can use, right? Help me parse truth from illusion. Guardians and protectors, help me parse truth from illusion.
01:34:13 Speaker_04
All of this is heightened right now in the age of the reclaiming of ritual, in the age of the modern spiritual seeker, in the age of the explosion of plant medicine use.
01:34:23 Speaker_04
Humanity is raw and porous and there are porosities that are being sought and celebrated, and sometimes that which is assumed to be spiritual is actually that state which is the most unanchored and most open to affliction.
01:34:38 Speaker_04
I'm kind of particularly interested in, I think there's a whole range of people, especially in the desensitized era of industrialization, there's a whole range of people that don't feel these things and that not feeling those things as its own kind of guardianship in a way.
01:34:54 Speaker_04
But what you have now is a whole kind of, I'd say, spiritual subclass that wants the spirit experience and is making themselves more and more porous through plant medicine or whatever, but also kind of rejects a lot of the traditional safeguards.
01:35:15 Speaker_04
You could say protocols and safeguards I want to be porous, I want to be open, I want to feel these spirit energies, but yet I'm allergic to traditional religion and I'm allergic to hierarchy and these types of things.
01:35:28 Speaker_04
So that kind of leaves me in a strange interim space that I think in some traditions would say you are ripe for the taking, basically.
01:35:39 Speaker_11
Absolutely. You're so juicy in that space.
01:35:44 Speaker_04
And if they were juicy before, add a heroic dose of entheogens and see what happens then. To say that the modern plant medicine space is often unguarded is probably an understatement. And look, I did my years of freeform entheogenic fun stuff too.
01:36:03 Speaker_04
I'm not trying to be the buzzkill here. But it's a different picture when thousands upon thousands of people are looking to plant medicines as the psycho-spiritual answer to all their problems.
01:36:14 Speaker_04
And when the plant medicine field is being monetized at a super rapid rate, and few, if any, of the supposed elders or experts in the space know what guardianship in that space actually looks like.
01:36:28 Speaker_04
For example, consider that pretty much no one who is gaining their psilocybin facilitator accreditation in the Western world can name one of the entities or energies
01:36:40 Speaker_04
that tends to show up during a traditional mushroom ritual, or how to call them or work with them, that's unguarded.
01:36:49 Speaker_04
And consider the proliferation of people leading free-form plant medicine circles and how many of those people actually have circles of accountability around them.
01:36:58 Speaker_04
And consider that the people who are now proclaiming themselves guardians of these substances, neuroscientists, political lobbyists, venture capitalists and psychotherapists, have no idea what it means to create guarded space from a spiritual perspective.
01:37:14 Speaker_04
Creating guarded space for people to experience psilocybin or mescaline or ayahuasca involves some of the things that are spoken of in the therapeutic context.
01:37:25 Speaker_04
But there's a whole other set of considerations, spiritual considerations, and that has to do across traditions with offering and spirit negotiation and integrity of the ritual circle.
01:37:40 Speaker_04
and understanding what forces are likely to show up and how to work with them, and which forces should be invited in and which should be dismissed with a song or a feather.
01:37:50 Speaker_04
It has to do with having basic protocols from a spiritual perspective for what to do when people encounter whirling vortexes, or sticky mud pits, or energetic snapping turtles, or lantern fish, or full-on malefic Amazonian swamp monsters.
01:38:09 Speaker_04
And I can guarantee you, when those forces come around, you don't want a neuroscientist or a venture capitalist or a psychedelic facilitator who's done psilocybin six times.
01:38:20 Speaker_04
You want someone with a song, or a feather, and the knowledge of how to use it. So to me, everything about all this screams, we need the fundamentals. We are pretty much roving adolescents who need the fundamentals.
01:38:40 Speaker_04
We need all the unsexy stuff, all the time peeling vegetables and sweeping floors, all that stuff that requires attention over time. We need morsels, not the all-you-can-eat 24-hour buffet.
01:38:56 Speaker_04
Modern Western spirituality is a lot like five-year-olds given carte blanche access to the ice cream bar. The immediate want to go right for the highest octane thing around.
01:39:08 Speaker_04
When asked about the cavalier open-mindedness of the modern Western spiritual seeker, Dr. Timalsina said this.
01:39:16 Speaker_10
I have to give credit for the Western students that they are very open-minded and inquisitive. And while giving credit, I also need to accept that they are so open-minded and inquisitive because they really don't know what they are talking about.
01:39:31 Speaker_10
So like you will find a hard time to convince somebody in Nepal or India to receive some of these higher Kali form mantras than people here in America because for the people there, they will ask 10 times, am I really qualified for it? Can I keep it?
01:39:50 Speaker_10
Can I retain it? What will happen to energy that will come to me tomorrow? And in here people are experimental. The good thing is students here learn a lot of things, but they don't practice.
01:40:01 Speaker_04
That's real, right? The westerner wants to go straight for the highest, deepest, secret mantra that people in traditional context would be like, no thanks. The westerner wants to hurl themselves into that unguarded space.
01:40:16 Speaker_04
But then a weird guardianship comes from the fact that those who go right for the 10,000 megawatt juice don't actually practice the mantra in any meaningful way anyway. So it all works out in the end, I guess.
01:40:29 Speaker_04
And I want to say here, the longing is real. The longing to repair the Western heart is real. The want to do ritual as 99% of our ancestors did is real. And it's good and it's necessary. And you know that I'm in favor of it.
01:40:50 Speaker_04
But I'm also looking around at the state of the modern spiritual world, and I'm seeing a lot of what you could call unguarded ritual space. What can leave ritual space unguarded?
01:41:07 Speaker_04
First and foremost, let's say a ritual that doesn't pay any attention at all to guardianship is unguarded. That should be a big flag, right?
01:41:17 Speaker_04
If the ritual just starts without any attention at all to feeding or establishing relationality or gratitude or context with greater forces, that's not congruent with thousands of years of ritual technology. And I want to get real specific here.
01:41:35 Speaker_04
That doesn't mean just going around in a circle and having everyone introduce themselves and talk about how they're feeling first. It means honoring and feeding the animate forces and delineating clear boundaries for the ritual space.
01:41:50 Speaker_04
And then there's ritual that's overly driven by market forces. For example, everybody's got to get their money's worth in the ritual space these days, right?
01:42:00 Speaker_04
So, because a ritual has to compete, because a ritual can't be boring, or dry, or uncomfortable, or like so many of the things that rituals in actual context actually are,
01:42:14 Speaker_04
There's a lot of pressure on the ritual facilitators to produce peak experiences and ecstatic states and wow everyone.
01:42:21 Speaker_04
And this is the exact opposite of how initiatory ritual frameworks work, in which what is of primary importance is if the animate forces themselves are properly honored.
01:42:34 Speaker_04
And little things like human boredom or comfort or what conflicting emotions you happen to be feeling in any given moment as a ritual participant aren't really the prime concern.
01:42:46 Speaker_04
So unguarded ritual space can look like an overemphasis on the cathartic psychological experience of the individuals rather than on the honoring of and feeding and tending to spirit forces.
01:42:58 Speaker_04
Unguarded ritual space can look like insistence on holding a ritual despite all signs to the contrary, because we've got a lot of people who paid for this ritual and came a really long way, so it's gotta happen now as opposed to truly listening to whether conditions are right.
01:43:13 Speaker_04
It can look like overly performative ritual facilitation. Ever seen that one? It can look like summoning or invoking by a ritual facilitator who does not know how to deal with what they summon. or like a whole lot of Instagram posts about the ritual.
01:43:30 Speaker_04
Like so many Instagram posts that it's hard to tell if the facilitators know the difference between actually holding a ritual and posting about a ritual. POV, here I am doing a grief ritual. Check out these tears.
01:43:45 Speaker_04
So modern reclamations of animate spiritualities drift into unguarded space often.
01:43:56 Speaker_04
The rush with which something is offered, the lack of container within which it is offered, the emphasis on monetizing it, the overemphasis on openness rather than defense, the emphasis on producing deep intimate emotional states, often with strangers, the lack of initiatory process.
01:44:17 Speaker_04
These are all concerns and considerations. And it's easy to dismiss these considerations as gatekeeping. And this is an interesting one, because traditionally gatekeepers are actually incredibly important in animate traditions.
01:44:32 Speaker_04
In fact, a whole lot of guardianship practices literally involve ritually installing gatekeepers.
01:44:39 Speaker_04
at the gates of our consciousness, and in that vision gatekeeping is a good thing, and step-by-step initiation is slow and deliberate, and you don't get access to everything all at once, and that's a guardianship.
01:44:56 Speaker_04
Just like it's a guardianship to our consciousness that we have guardians at the sense gates who filter the stimuli of the universe for us, and we don't receive it all at once.
01:45:12 Speaker_04
All this can leave the modern practitioner feeling a little overwhelmed, right? Like, what do I do with all these considerations?
01:45:19 Speaker_04
I just wanted to get into this animism stuff to reawaken a little wonder in my life, and now all of a sudden I've got to worry about offending nagas and territorial landlords?
01:45:31 Speaker_04
It can even lead to paranoia, to a hyper-attunement to the perceived presence of malefic forces, this kind of thing. In reality though, guardianship practices are very simple. The simplest practices of all.
01:45:50 Speaker_04
There's guardianship in knowing which way is east. in rising with the sunrise and feeling those rays of first light on one's skin, in connecting to the four directions.
01:46:05 Speaker_04
Four directions practices or seven directions practices, present in so many traditions, establish simple relationality between the microcosm and the macrocosm.
01:46:17 Speaker_04
Connect us to coherence in the consciousness and cosmos, so that there are points of integrity, a latticework of integrity that starts to build in the consciousness. A mandala of living, luminous integrity, formed of songs and prayers and gratitudes.
01:46:41 Speaker_04
of poems and tears, of deep cleansing breaths and flower offerings. Greet the dawn, says Martin Shaw. Orient to a liturgical calendar. Note the differing qualities of silence in a day. Be there for others. These will do us the world of good.
01:47:02 Speaker_04
These are technologies for defeating demons. In an age of somatic fracture, getting our hands deep into clay is a guardianship. Making art ritually, regularly, is a guardianship. Just ask the boy who drew cats.
01:47:23 Speaker_04
The young temple acolyte who drew cats everywhere on the temple walls and the rice paper screens. Until his master became so fed up with him drawing cats that he sent him away. And he went to an old abandoned temple way up on a hill.
01:47:39 Speaker_04
And there in that abandoned temple he found blank screens and cakes of ink. And he ground the ink and he drew his beloved cats to his heart's content. And when he went to sleep that night, he heard a terrible sound.
01:47:59 Speaker_04
For that temple was home to an ancient demon. And that demon liked nothing better to eat than young acolyte.
01:48:10 Speaker_04
He heard this terrible gnashing and clawing and screaming and gurgling and stopped up his ears and tried to sleep through the night, huddled in a cabinet in the corner.
01:48:21 Speaker_04
And when he woke the next morning and stepped out into the temple hall and looked at his paintings of his beloved cats, they had blood dripping from their claws and their mouths. And the demon was dead on the ground. Art can be a guardianship.
01:48:44 Speaker_04
But not all art is a guardianship. As native sculptor Rose B. Simpson says,
01:48:52 Speaker_09
95% of the modern art I see makes me physically ill, like sick. And it's like, well, in the future, we'll look back at this time and be like, wow, humans are really messed up. You know what I mean? And like, I know what you mean. Yeah.
01:49:07 Speaker_09
And so I think that is a great example of like, we are channeling some really messed up values and perpetuating that in the world. And those value systems are really backwards.
01:49:21 Speaker_09
I have to be conscious of what I make and thinking about what I make and how it affects the people around me and who I represent in a sense in the world and how what I do in that world, the art world, that is the contemporary art world, affects my community and my people.
01:49:41 Speaker_09
And because I was raised here, I understand, you know, what it is that might affect negatively my community. And so I I have a boundary. Like I can't just make anything, right? And I think about how blessed I am to have that boundary.
01:49:57 Speaker_09
Like that boundary, like I can't make certain things.
01:50:00 Speaker_04
I can't make certain things. That's a guardianship.
01:50:05 Speaker_09
My intention has to be super clear and clean. And like, I can't be bringing icky shit into the world. Like we can do that. Like that's possible, right? And I don't want to be that conduit for that and have to be really conscious of that.
01:50:21 Speaker_09
And I'm not going to lie, the art world is full of that. And I have to be really careful as I navigate that.
01:50:27 Speaker_04
Knowing there's a difference between good things and icky shit. This basic discernment that's getting lost in a confused sea of postmodernism. That's a guardianship. I have limits and boundaries. That's a guardianship.
01:50:44 Speaker_04
I can't let certain forces pass through. That's a guardianship.
01:50:49 Speaker_09
I have to be really, really careful about who I let through. I wear a lot of protection all the time. I believe deeply in having protection from that stuff because I've had some really bad experiences, you know, and I think I'm still learning.
01:51:07 Speaker_09
I really feel that you have to be discerning and that we have to be careful. When I am in a state of you know, connection or faith or trust in the process that I have to make sure that I have my protection, my smoke, my certain stones.
01:51:25 Speaker_09
Those things are vital. And I, like, especially creative places, I got all of my warriors surrounding, protecting. There's stuff going on there and only good things are allowed. Only blessings allowed here. None of that bullshit allowed.
01:51:41 Speaker_04
I can't be open to everything. That's a guardianship. Kind of like the attitude that the practice is to be open to everything all the time and just how that's not really, I don't know of a traditional culture that sees it that way.
01:51:56 Speaker_04
Say yes to everything, be open to everything.
01:51:58 Speaker_09
I don't know if that's our place. You know, I think that there are beings that that's their job, but I don't know if, like, I think we chose to be humans, to have boundaries, to have density, to have grounding.
01:52:12 Speaker_09
And I think that part of being a human is the actual experience of edges and of just the absolutely incredible experience of vulnerability. And would you really want to do that for me? Like, would you really want to?
01:52:30 Speaker_09
Then you're missing out on what is absolutely spectacular about being a human in the third dimension.
01:52:39 Speaker_04
That deep breath we take when we remember the closeness of the Holy Mystery? That's a guardianship. The tiniest little bit of space we give ourselves in a day to connect? That's a guardianship. All these acts of remembering are guardianships.
01:52:56 Speaker_04
We remember, in the midst of the deluge, which way is up. What we're here for. Where we're heading. Who our relations are.
01:53:06 Speaker_04
how connected we are, we remember the scent of wafting cedar, the light we saw in that one dream, the voice through which the spirit of nature has always sought to guide us safely through the water. This connection takes practice.
01:53:30 Speaker_04
In a modern world of fracture and fragmentation and a disorienting deluge of voices that push and pull and hold our attention for hours at a time, it's not enough to simply freeform sit with our minds and see what shows up.
01:53:46 Speaker_04
The practice is to architect a mandala. To breathe the dust off of energetic relationships that exist but need constant replenishment. To establish living relationships that can adorn the consciousness even as they guard it.
01:54:04 Speaker_04
And I have to remind myself constantly. Establish this connection to the surrounding powers daily. Before I reach for the phone and expose myself to who knows what. Breathe, as Jose Barrero says, the real air each morning.
01:54:24 Speaker_04
Offer gratitude to the directions, to the celestial bodies above, to the waters, to the ancestors, and to the earth beneath our feet.
01:54:35 Speaker_00
I definitely follow the guidance of my mentor, Sri Vimalananda. He would say that whenever you're going to sit and do any kind of actual invocation of something, the first thing you do is you salute the earth.
01:54:51 Speaker_00
And you have to get some kind of response from the earth that you and the earth are at that moment aligned. So the earth is going to support you during whatever it is you're going to do.
01:55:03 Speaker_00
So first you make sure that you and the earth are in a good alignment at that moment. And that's what's called in Sanskrit the Bhumi Puja. Puja means ritual worship and Bhumi means earth. Then you do the Buddha Puja.
01:55:19 Speaker_00
So Buddha represents everything that is in the past.
01:55:23 Speaker_00
It represents ancestors, it represents dead humans, it represents everything that has been created already and that is possibly lying around littering the astral landscape that you don't necessarily want to have present when you're doing the job that you want to do.
01:55:41 Speaker_00
And so with the Bhuta Puja, you attempt to simply say, I am now purifying this space. Everybody in the neighborhood is welcome to come and view what's going on. But you have to do it at least at a distance of my outstretched arms.
01:55:57 Speaker_00
You can't come any closer than that, because otherwise I'm not going to be able to focus on what I'm doing. I'm going to have to be paying attention to you. And I don't have time for that. because I have a specific purpose behind what I'm trying to do.
01:56:10 Speaker_00
It's nothing personal, but you want everything to be out of it that does not belong in it at that moment.
01:56:16 Speaker_00
What I like to do to have that kind of effect is to express metta, to express loving-kindness in all directions, send compassion out to all sentient beings, in every possible loca, every possible dimension, all over the universe.
01:56:33 Speaker_00
So because I'm sending that out in all directions, nobody has to come in and try to take it from me. They're getting attention. They're getting some love and kindness, and they can stay where they are and remain calm while I'm doing what I need to do.
01:56:48 Speaker_01
Again, if your practice is actually working and you're generating power, then your practice space tends to attract those non-corporeal beings, most of which are relatively innocent.
01:57:00 Speaker_01
But you want to clear the space every morning, and traditionally in tantra you take a flower and you place the flower in your hand in a particular mudra. And then you whisper your weapon mantra, your protective mantra, into the flower.
01:57:16 Speaker_01
You imagine the flower bursting into flames, into energetic flames with the power of the mantra. And then you fling the flower into the practice space, and it functions like an energetic grenade and clears the space.
01:57:31 Speaker_01
and you get out of the way to let everything come out, and then you enter your practice space.
01:57:38 Speaker_01
Lastly, I'd mention that we seal the sense gates, often just in a very simple way, like at the end of a practice, by imagining a flash of light, a flash of blue light. I was taught that it could be a white light. Flash of light at each of the
01:57:56 Speaker_01
orifices of the body the gates of the body and the mantra whom and it just takes a few seconds so and the crown of the head is also considered an orifice even though you have skull there right but when you're a tiny baby you didn't right and that door never never fully closes we protect all these orifices with whom and a flash of blue light the lower orifices as well
01:58:22 Speaker_01
and just as a way of like consecrating the body again not from a fearful stance.
01:58:29 Speaker_04
The sense gates are often invoked in guardianship practices because in many traditions the sense gates are seen as openings where things can pass into our systems, our mouths, our eyes.
01:58:42 Speaker_04
These are portals of exit and entry and we can adorn the sense gates with guardians who live there. There at the gateway, I'll leave my sentinel, says one pontoon. I'll leave the Lord who closes and opens the pathways there at the gate.
01:58:58 Speaker_10
So these guardian deities safeguard your corporeality. These guardian deities, like when you have 10 deep followers, what do they do? There are 10 guardian deities, major guardian deities. What do they do?
01:59:14 Speaker_10
They protect your five motor organs and five sensory faculties. These are the guardian deities to protect your body, your sensory faculties, and your motor organs.
01:59:28 Speaker_04
Guardianship is about looking closely at what we take in through the sense gates. What we take in through our mouths. What we take in through our eyes. You remember what we take in through our eyes.
01:59:48 Speaker_04
Pause for a moment here and just feel into how much these bodies of ours take in through our eyes these days. Think of what we expose our eyes to. Would it be right to say that our eyes have seen too much? Our eyes have seen too much.
02:00:15 Speaker_04
Beloved, our eyes have seen too much. You feel me? There are things that I wish I could unsee. There are things I hope for my children never to have to see. And can you wash them from my eyes, great heart of the world?
02:00:41 Speaker_04
Ah, Santa Lucia, eyes of the seer, could you wash them from my eyes, all the things I should never have seen? Can you wash them from my eyes, all the things I should never have seen? And can you wash, Lucia, wash this memory clean?
02:01:09 Speaker_06
Do you remember our eyes before? Before all this?
02:01:36 Speaker_04
O matron saint of afflicted eyes, have mercy on a world of tired eyes. Simple question for me is specifically around the eyes and what the eyes are exposed to through the endless stream of content through screens.
02:01:56 Speaker_04
I know that there are traditional practices of installing mantras and this type of thing around the eyes. I mean, the most fundamental practice is obviously choosing not to look at that stuff so much.
02:02:06 Speaker_04
That's the most fundamental practice, for sure, absolutely. But are there other practices that you've seen to care for the eyes specifically, to keep them more sound?
02:02:18 Speaker_00
build a fire and sit with the fire and communicate with everybody in the neighborhood and the living things and also the astral things and the spiritual things.
02:02:28 Speaker_00
Not everybody can do that, but everybody can have either a candle or an oil lamp, and they can do what the yogic people call trataka.
02:02:37 Speaker_00
And trataka means you stare at the tip of the flame, right where the flame goes from being luminous to being invisible. Traditionally, they say you should stare long enough until your eyes start to tear slightly.
02:02:51 Speaker_00
All that you would be doing is reminding your eyes of what it means to be connected to the real fire element.
02:03:01 Speaker_00
And when you're doing that, you can say something, you can create whatever kind of language you want to about it, but you can say something like, please, oh fire, make sure as far as possible that my eyes see only what is worthy to be seen.
02:03:20 Speaker_04
Our eyes, longing for the true fire, seek out all manner of addictive imagery. Imagery beautiful and terrible, imagery alluring and revolting, imagery entrancing and distracting. What motivates us to expose our eyes to so much? Habit? Addiction? love.
02:03:46 Speaker_04
It's possible in this day and age that the concern, the love that we have for the world could prompt us to expose ourselves to a non-stop torrent of disturbing imagery of all the horrible things going on in the world.
02:04:03 Speaker_04
We could feel it's our responsibility to expose ourselves repeatedly to scenes of depraved violence so that we can take action to stop it. And the want to stay current, to be informed so that we can help is necessary. I try to stay current.
02:04:23 Speaker_04
I try to help. And I'll just say that feeling a responsibility to be informed so we can act is very different on a purely somatic level.
02:04:37 Speaker_04
from opening the apertures of the body in a vulnerable trance state and receiving a steady beam of luminous imagery of horrible sadistic violence straight into our brains.
02:04:51 Speaker_04
The combination of the trance state that the phone induces, the fact that we don't even acknowledge or are conscious of the fact that it's a trance state, the emotional openness that a post about suffering children provokes, for example, with the particular friction that comes from being engrossed in something and yet far away from it at once.
02:05:14 Speaker_04
combined with the shock jolt of the unexpected horrifying image itself, which arrives amidst a stream of other nonsensical imagery.
02:05:24 Speaker_04
Snoop Dogg memes, spiritual self-help quotes, limbless children in Palestine, in a continuous unpredictable stream, this is completely and utterly disruptive to the human system.
02:05:39 Speaker_04
For anyone familiar with Spiritist traditions, for example, it would be hard to see this as anything other than deeply damaging. We can help. We can do all the necessary work to help to alleviate suffering.
02:05:55 Speaker_04
And we don't have to take in everything all the time through the medium of the phone, says Palestinian-American activist Nadia Irshad Gilbert.
02:06:06 Speaker_08
And so really the best thing we can do, because we're going to continue to see these things, and we're going to continue to have to bear witness to what it looks like when systems of harm are perpetrated and then are falling apart, is we need to be increasing our capacity.
02:06:24 Speaker_08
And increasing our capacity is a regular practice of taking care of our attention, taking care of our well-being, our hearts, our minds. taking care of our very, very sensitive and subtle and acute ability to perceive the world around us.
02:06:44 Speaker_08
And what I'm realizing, especially recently, or what's becoming really, really obvious is just how many people do not know how to regulate their emotions or their nervous system
02:06:56 Speaker_08
do not know how to take in information or process it and do not know how to see clearly for themselves.
02:07:05 Speaker_08
And that's where my concern is that people need to really take a step back and acknowledge how deeply sensitive they are and deeply perceptive they are and that it's
02:07:19 Speaker_08
a powerful thing that we are as humans and also that we have a certain level of maintenance and responsibility that we have to take care of ourselves because what's being asked of us is to increase our capacity right now.
02:07:32 Speaker_08
And if you're, if your nerves are fried, and if you are consuming all of this really unconsciously, you are going to burn out and you're going to be of no help to anyone, certainly not yourself.
02:07:45 Speaker_08
I think we need to have a real raw conversation about what this space is and, you know, this space being social media and places like Instagram and the reality that it is this kind of space that seems to be experiencing or seems to be projecting some kind of a psychosis of seeing the extremities of the world
02:08:09 Speaker_08
the way that we may see some lavish person on a yacht and then the next post see something funny or upsetting or you know and then the next thing could be just the most inexplicable violence that you never thought you would see in your life and we need to have a real serious conversation about the fact that that's this environment and that we have a responsibility to ourselves
02:08:34 Speaker_08
and to the world, frankly.
02:08:35 Speaker_08
If we feel that we are people who are here to make any kind of lasting change or impact, it's our responsibility to be very aware of these settings we put ourselves in and the choices we make when we open our phones, and to not do so mindlessly.
02:08:52 Speaker_08
and to not do so in a way that is unconscious. And unfortunately, these places were built to be used unconsciously. And so there is a certain level of work that we need to be doing on our brains and our attention.
02:09:07 Speaker_08
that is sort of beyond self-care and into self-sovereignty and your awareness of how valuable your attention is and how much it is being fought for right now.
02:09:26 Speaker_04
So, I'm not saying run and hide from the realities of the world. I'm asking, do you have even the most basic practices of guardianship as you expose your psyche to some really serious stuff? Give these tired eyes a rest.
02:09:46 Speaker_04
Gaze instead, just for a while, into the tip of the flame. gaze at the waves of the thundering sea. Stare into these eyes, the beloved goddess says, and I will gaze back at thee.
02:10:07 Speaker_04
Says the Sariputta Sutta, quote, because anyone dwelling with the eye faculty uncontrolled could be overwhelmed by cupidity and dejection, malefic and fractured states of mind, Therefore, practice to control the eye faculty.
02:10:26 Speaker_04
Guard it as one guards the sense doors. Therefore, this is how to train yourself. We will guard the doors of our senses and we will be given to watchfulness. Be watchful, my friends.
02:10:42 Speaker_04
I'll go out on a limb and say that the number one thing that people need to armor themselves against in this modern world from a consciousness perspective is the disruptive agitation caused by what they see on the internet.
02:10:57 Speaker_04
This impulse we have to stare into the false fire isn't happening just on the level of, I need to stay informed. This is deep, trance state, brain stem, somatic reprogramming type stuff. As with everything else, we think we can handle it all.
02:11:17 Speaker_04
It's my responsibility to see it all. I'm an individualist who's going to fix it. I mean, it's pretty easy to see the latent Protestant humanist burden at play here. We think it's all up to us. I'm going to take the sins of the world on my shoulders.
02:11:35 Speaker_04
I will allow all the suffering in the world to be beamed through my eyes in a suggestible state and I'll be just fine. We think we can dwell in the fake astral realm for hours upon hours a day and just switch it off and be okay.
02:11:51 Speaker_04
The meteoric rise in total brokenness, anxiousness, depression, isolation, all this shows we can't. We've got to guard ourselves in this world. We've got to call great forces to our aid. We've got to call the deep ancestral line.
02:12:12 Speaker_04
We've got to walk with angels and spirit helpers by our sides. Sometimes, like Indiga the hunter, we've got to turn our very heads into torches that keep the tigers at bay.
02:12:26 Speaker_04
We've got to paint ourselves with syllables like Hoichi, to make ourselves invisible to demons. But if you paint yourself with syllables, Hoichi teaches us, remember to paint your ears too. Remember to guard your sense gates.
02:12:44 Speaker_04
Don't leave those ears and eyes too open. Who knows what you might see, and who knows what might see you. We've got to have a retinue. Look at those guardian mandalas, and that's the first thing that stands out. A retinue. A posse.
02:13:06 Speaker_04
How do we gain a retinue? We have to be able to keep things. We have to be able to hold things. Gathering magic, remember?
02:13:17 Speaker_04
We have to not squander everything away continuously, posting and reposting and chasing followers at the expense of our actual energetic integrity. We've got to have guardians at the gates.
02:13:32 Speaker_04
And if you have to go into the precarious scroll space, if it's truly necessary for your life, your activism, for your connection to the greater world, how about acknowledging it with a little guardianship ritual first? Something like this.
02:13:52 Speaker_04
Guardians and protectors, now I step into this great charnel ground. This great bardo called the internet. I recognize that this is a place of wild and precarious forces.
02:14:05 Speaker_04
A place where I may see things distracting and disturbing that will tug at my attention and try to get in. Guardians and protectors, keep me safe. Keep me linked to you. Keep me connected to the four directions and the sun and the moon.
02:14:19 Speaker_04
so that I remember which way is up even while in the midst of turbulent seas. May anything that does not serve dissolve like frost in the sun into the vast primal ground of space.
02:14:32 Speaker_04
May all that serves serve me well in this life and be used for the benefit of all beings. How about something like that? There are many traditions that speak such invocations when entering the spirit world.
02:14:51 Speaker_04
Probably a good idea when entering the false spirit world, too, don't you think? Come to our aid, protectors. Let us not fall sway to false Nigerian princes and Instagram policy violation scams. Keep the talking animal memes to an acceptable minimum.
02:15:07 Speaker_04
Give me the discernment to recognize fake Buddha quotes and may I know when to say Rumi never said that and when to turn the other way.
02:15:16 Speaker_04
Pepper my feed with the right amount of satire so that I see the humor in it all, but not so much that I fall into cynicism, barking like the hounds of Kynos in the streets.
02:15:27 Speaker_04
Warm my heart with the communal fire of TikTok sea shanties, but keep all the roving trollbots at bay.
02:15:35 Speaker_04
Give us each day our daily healing from healing fix, and forgive us our clickbait, as we forgive those boomers who post what should be easily spotable AI-generated photos of Trump-supporting Swifties in their feeds.
02:15:48 Speaker_04
For thine is the network, the download speed, and the content, forever and ever. Amen. Guard us, great forces, for real. Guard us. Guard our tongues and our throats. Guard our backs and our shoulders. Guard our joints and our feet.
02:16:08 Speaker_04
Guard our heart's creator. Guard us. Guard us in this uncertain world. Help us come to know who watches over us, who lives right above our heads. In some traditions, a person comes to know that there is one who guards their head.
02:16:27 Speaker_04
who lives right above their head and that guardian takes care of a whole lot of the negotiation of life's hidden forces beyond our control. And all they require is loving adoration. When we know this, we can let go and let them take the reins.
02:16:47 Speaker_04
We can surrender a little bit. Dr. Timosina was asked on a recent course call if he could recommend one practice, what would it be? One practice that distills all the teachings. What are we to do? And he said, surrender at her feet.
02:17:09 Speaker_10
surrender at her feet. What gives final solace to me when I want to go back home, home I'm talking about the heart, is when I go to the mother and I surrender at her feet and I realize how I know absolutely nothing and every word I wrote is
02:17:32 Speaker_10
being instrumental to serve our feet. And that surrendering and the grace that I feel back from her compassionate gaze is what helps me move the next day. And I feel recharged.
02:17:48 Speaker_10
So I would say that there is nothing actually higher and above and beyond love.
02:17:57 Speaker_04
For perhaps surrender is the greatest guardianship of all. There's the guardianship of taking regular methodic action, of elaborately constructing mandalas of guardianship in our lives. And there's the guardianship of letting go.
02:18:18 Speaker_04
Letting go and coming to trust in the eternal. Trust in the eternal. Refuge in the eternal. This is guardianship indeed.
02:18:32 Speaker_11
When Buddhists say you have to take refuge in something that's reliable, they mean you have to take refuge in something which is really infallible from life to life, from experience to experience.
02:18:46 Speaker_11
You can have the strongest deity on your side or the most powerful ancestors or spirits, but there is only one level of mind or existence that's infallible, that is an ultimate refuge or shelter across lifetimes, across states of consciousness.
02:19:06 Speaker_11
And so this is what you're doing. You're entering into a family which is defined by its commitment to indestructibility.
02:19:16 Speaker_11
The definition of a refuge in Tibetan Buddhist terms is something which is enduring beyond the conditionalities and the vagaries of samsara. So an experience is not a refuge, even if it lasts for a hundred thousand years.
02:19:32 Speaker_11
If you've made a pact with a spirit, that spirit has a lifespan. That pact has a lifespan. So deities and spirit relationships are empowering and shamans rely on them and use them, but they're not a refuge.
02:19:46 Speaker_11
They don't necessarily survive death or the death of that spirit. An emotion can't be your refuge. A philosophical tradition in and of itself can't be your refuge. Certainly not an identity you'd built as someone doing the work or healing
02:20:05 Speaker_11
None of those can be a refuge. But if you don't know what your refuge is aside from seeking my true self, you are very unprotected, I suppose.
02:20:14 Speaker_11
You might have a very interesting time and you might stumble on great spiritual insights or realization or power.
02:20:22 Speaker_04
There's not a cosmic anchor.
02:20:24 Speaker_11
Yeah, it's a big reason why I sort of shifted from the intensive dabbling I was doing in so many different things, because I was like, where is the grounding?
02:20:36 Speaker_04
Right. Why are we doing all this spiritual experimentation, all this practice? Why are we lighting candles and making offerings? What are we really seeking to connect to? Are we doing it out of sheer curiosity? As Ben said, out of boredom?
02:20:53 Speaker_04
For some type of personal control? Ultimately, there's one key guardianship. One guardianship that precedes all else. And if that guardianship is not there, we'll never feel truly guarded or held. What is this guardianship? Connection to the ultimate.
02:21:18 Speaker_04
Connection to Source. To Goddess. To God. To the Great Pulsing Consciousness of the Universe. To Eternal Nature. deep heart recognition of and regular connection to the very heart of the universe itself.
02:21:40 Speaker_04
All this ritual practice, this animate practice, is for the negotiation of immediate relationalities that ultimately exist to connect us to Source, to the heart of the universe.
02:21:53 Speaker_04
What else would we possibly be doing it for than to come to trust and love and be held by the very nature of this place. Trying to practice guardianship without recognizing the existence of one overarching ultimate view?
02:22:13 Speaker_04
At best, it will leave unresolved precarities and anxiousnesses in our hearts. At worst, it can drive a person mad. For if all there is to this universe are spirals of conflicting lateral-horizontal forces feeding off each other in randomness,
02:22:29 Speaker_04
then the entire focus is on the temporal battle. And you can see this in traditions that get sucked into black magic and jockeying for spirit control.
02:22:40 Speaker_04
But the true practice is not to gain superpowers or to be able to wield spirit darts or to become some kind of weird shaman influencer. It's to connect us to the eternal heart of creation.
02:22:54 Speaker_04
And when our connection to the eternal source, to the vastness, to the inexpressibly beautiful pattern of all that is,
02:23:03 Speaker_04
to that which births all and destroys all and renews it yet again to the green fuse of the fire of time is strong when our connection is strong and we feel it as close as David heard the breeze blowing through his lyre
02:23:25 Speaker_04
We might be called to sing something like, Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. It's up to everyone to find who their thou is.
02:23:47 Speaker_04
But there is no thou deeper, greater, vaster than the loving heart and seed source of creation itself. And when could you possibly have been anywhere but with us all along, Creator? With us all along. With us all along.
02:24:13 Speaker_04
Your sweet breath upon us, Mother. Your warm arms around us. Your ornaments ablaze. Deep skies above us, Mother. Your ornaments ablaze. Guardians and protectors, help me negotiate what is right before my eyes, even as you lead us to better days.
02:25:07 Speaker_04
Special thanks to my guest for this episode, Dr. Robert Svoboda, wonderful author and longtime Ayurvedic practitioner. His work can be checked out more deeply at drsvoboda.com. Dr. Ben Jaffe, cultural anthropologist with a
02:25:31 Speaker_04
long history in the Western esoteric and occult traditions, in addition to his study of Tibetan Tantra, joined us today. And you can check out more of Ben's work at perfumedskull.com.
02:25:44 Speaker_04
I had a two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Ben about these topics, and select quotes were taken for this episode.
02:25:52 Speaker_04
But if you want to hear the entire thing, it's available to podcast patrons, and you can find out more at patreon.com slash The Emerald Podcast. Dr. Harish Wallace, author of Tantra Illuminated.
02:26:04 Speaker_04
Harish's courses and offerings can be found at tantrailluminated.org. And thanks to Harish for chanting an invocation to the lokapalas, the directional protectors, that made its way into the soundtrack of this episode.
02:26:20 Speaker_04
And hopefully the protectors don't mind a little pitch bend and phase shift. Harish and I also had a longer conversation that's available to be listened to in an episode of his podcast, the Tantra Illuminated podcast.
02:26:34 Speaker_04
It features basically the entire conversation we had. Dr. Stanisław Tymolcina, who is a Sanskrit acharya and tantric scholar and deeply knowledgeable practitioner, teacher.
02:26:48 Speaker_04
If you want to know more about these traditions and want to learn from someone who is practicing and studying and teaching in lineage.
02:26:57 Speaker_04
I highly recommend checking out his work, and you can find out more at the Vimarsha Foundation, that's vimarsha.org, v-i-m-a-r-s-h-a.org, and he offers free courses, which is something very wonderful in this day and age.
02:27:12 Speaker_04
Nadia Irshad Gilbert, the voice and presence behind the Instagram account Nadia Diaspora, is a Palestinian-American activist who joined us for the Justice episode and offered her perspectives on visual media and activism in this episode.
02:27:28 Speaker_04
Many thanks, Nadia. And thanks to Mark Wax and Marina Alves for research on this episode. It took a lot of research to bring this to life. And as always, this episode contains reference to many books, articles, films, songs, etc.
02:27:43 Speaker_04
These include the third chapter of the Guji, or the Four Medical Tantras, the song Exu by Ulriki, O Livro Essencial de Umbanda by Ajmir Barbosa, writing in 2014, The song Let That Water Wash Over Me, by Pia.
02:28:01 Speaker_04
The album Eardrum Medicine, by Mixmaster Mike. The song Stop, Look and Listen, by MC Light. The song Battle, by Gangstar. The song Harlem World, by ODB.
02:28:13 Speaker_04
Envy and the Closed Body, in Maracatu de Baque Solto, in Pernambuco, Brazil, by Filippo Bonini Baraldi, writing for Cielo, Brazil. The Biography of Machik Labdron, Sultram Alione, writing in Women of Wisdom, coming from Snow Lion Publications.
02:28:30 Speaker_04
Two articles by Cameron Bailey. These are Guardian and Protector Deities in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. and the progenitor of all Dharma protectors, Buddhist Shaivism in Lelung Jepe Dorje's Ocean of Oathbound Protectors.
02:28:47 Speaker_04
Psalm 23 from the Bible. Oracles and Demons of Tibet by René de Nibisky-Vojkowicz. Vasilisa the Beautiful, a Russian folktale by Anna Morgunova. Folk Tales of the Amur by Dmitri Nagishkin.
02:29:00 Speaker_04
The Boy Who Drew Cats and Hoichi the Earless, Japanese tales translated by Lafcadio Hearn. The Sariputta Sutta, translated from the Pali by Maurice O'Connell Walsh. The Atarakita Sutta, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
02:29:16 Speaker_04
The writings of Martin Shaw in the House of Beasts and Vines substack. The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks.
02:29:23 Speaker_04
And speaking of knowing when to say Rumi didn't say that and when not to, the whole quote about the field beyond concepts of wrongdoing and rightdoing, which is quoted so much, is a mistranslation.
02:29:35 Speaker_04
And the quote is actually, according to Dr. Omid Safi, about getting to the wild open space beyond metaphorical or conceptual spirituality, the place where religious practice is aligned to the real.
02:29:51 Speaker_04
It's a little different, and it's different in ways that are relevant to this episode. The Fragmentary Tantra from the Age of Ngunzot Gelpo, translated by Ben Jaffe, The song Archangel on the Precipice by Vine Music.
02:30:03 Speaker_04
That's Janae Rogers, and you can find Vine Music on Instagram. That's V-Y-N Music. A really fabulous drumbeat coming to us from Shinlace, that's Portia Richardson's music project. Her Instagram is scinn.laece.
02:30:22 Speaker_04
The Copper-Colored Mountain by Georgios Halkias and Christina Partzilaki. And of course, the song Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison.
02:30:31 Speaker_04
Which, if you really listen to the lyrics, what do roses and thorns actually have to do with the sad songs of Cowboys?
02:30:40 Speaker_04
I don't see the correlation, but it's still a great song, and just to annoy my wife, I'm gonna close out this episode with this version.
02:30:52 Speaker_07
We both lie silently still in the dead of the night Although we both lie close together We feel miles apart inside Was it something I said or something I did? Did my words not come out right?
02:31:11 Speaker_07
Though I try not to hurt you Yeah, I try But I guess that's why they say Every rose has its thorn Just like every night Every cowboy sings his sad, sad song