Swami Lakshmanjoo and Kashmir Shaivism: A Conversation with George Barselaar

Intro: The recognition of higher states of consciousness is a recurring theme that is evident in all cultures throughout history.
What is the basis of our conscious experience—the cycle of waking, dreaming, and sleeping?
The simplest state of awareness is a self-referral state; it is a field of all possibilities.
As the physicist Eddington said, "The stuff of the world is mind stuff."
The ancient Yoga Vasishtha likewise teaches that this world appears material but is ultimately pure consciousness.
These profound insights infer that consciousness is all there is, and we are not in the world, the world is within us.
Welcome to Simplest State where we examine these understandings and explore the very nature of consciousness and self-realization.
Ron: Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us today on this episode of Simplest State. Just a quick reminder that if you like the content of our podcast, please take a moment to subscribe to us on YouTube and to our podcast.
I'm happy to tell you today that our guest is George Barselaar. In 1981, George went to Kashmir, India, to study with the revered saint Swami Lakshmanjoo. He became a close disciple of Swamiji and spent most of the last 45 years living in India, and he's connecting with us now from Nepal, where he continues to work on Swami Lakshmanjoo's teachings of Kashmir Shaivism.
Welcome George, it's great to see you again.
George: Welcome Ron, and welcome to your audience wherever they are. It's, it's morning here in Nepal and evening where you are in Vancouver.
Ron: Correct. George, I'd like to start with the teachings of Swami Lakshmanjoo. It's been several years since we've spoken. You've spent a great deal of time and were very close with Swamiji. I wonder if you could speak to us a little bit about what aspects of his teachings have had the most profound impact on your understanding of Kashmir Shaivism and how that understanding may have grown over these years.
George: Good, good question. I think I, the history of it, for me, I have to go back a little bit to my days with Maharishi because I was very much involved with the Transcendental Meditation and TM.
I became a teacher, and somewhere in 1974, 75, Maharishi started a Vedic science course. And, at that time he gave out different texts for people to read.
And one of the documents that he gave out was the, the Shiva Sutras. And I had never heard of the Shiva Sutras. We had to read things like the Rig Veda, ninth and tenth mandalas of that -- the last chapters, the Yoga Vasishtha.These were all texts that I was familiar with, but Shiva Sutras was something really foreign, and all that Maharishi gave us and those people that were studying the Vedic science course was a, a four page sheet on Indian legal paper.
I remember, because it was very long. And at the top it had the Shiva Sutras by Bal Brahmachari Swami Lakshmanjoo, Ishber Nishat, Gupta Ganga, Kashmir. And I read those and they, they resonated with me. And it was just the English translation of about, maybe 60, 70 verses.
And I, over, over a period of time, I found a text of that, again, it had been translated into English by a Indian scholar who studied this text with Swami Lakshmanjoo.
So in 1980, 81, I asked Maharishi, I said, Maharishi, I would really like to go and, and pursue a deeper study of basically, you know, Kashmir Shaivism. Now, I had been teaching, I'd been a teacher for eight years, taught many people TM. I was very, very in love with the teaching. I have to say it that way because it was, it was my life.
And Maharishi paused for a while and they said, okay, I'll let you go. You should, you should, You should go and teach for another year and then go to Kashmir. And I went to Kashmir with all of this enthusiasm, the blessings of Maharishi, who I considered to be my guru, not knowing what to expect. And I remember on my arrival there, I had all this, this illusion of grandeur of studying this text and, and gaining all this really deep knowledge.
And I had a good background in, in, in what I'd already studied, the Vedanta, of Sankhya. And even a background in Sanskrit. Not a scholarly Sanskrit, but I could, I could read Sanskrit and I understood the, the, the basics. So when I got there, my thirst was, was a real strong thirst for, for knowledge. I would say I was greedy for knowledge.
And when I met Swami Lakshmanjoo, he must have sensed this straight away. So, instead of giving me an opportunity to study very deeply, he accepted me as a, as we could say, a disciple, but he didn't let me really study the text. In fact, it was a blessing in disguise because when he found out I was a civil engineer, he allowed me to come to the ashram almost every day and do work in the ashram, demolishing buildings, doing all of this, doing...
And for the first six years I had very little time to really study, which was my original goal. And I think what it was that when that initial impulse to study for all the wrong reasons, which was, you know, oh wow, really cool, I know this, this is a unique philosophy. It's a kind of a power thing where you have power over people who don't know.
When that dissipated -- and I didn't know, it disappeared very, very effortlessly -- Swamiji turned and said, okay, now it's time for you to study. And I also delved into the teaching then with an empty cup. I hadn't forgotten everything I knew, but I wasn't in the position now to compare what he was going to teach, or what he had already taught, with what I already knew, which is a real fault of a lot of scholars.
When you sit at the feet of a person who is a master in a particular tradition, you have to be totally empty to really, you can listen, but you may not hear what he's saying. So prior to that date, some 10 years before I arrived there, Maharishi had traveled to Kashmir. He actually went there on three occasions. And Maharishi was interested in two texts, the Shiva Sutras, he was also interested in the, a text called the Vijnana Bhairava.
And on one of the teacher training course, there was a, an American couple, John Hughes and his wife Denise. John was doing his PhD in, in Indology, Indian philosophy. And he asked Maharishi's permission, he said, Maharishi, we met Swami Lakshmanjoo and nobody knows about his tradition. It's unheard of in the Western world. There are just a few fragments, and I would like to go and do my PhD with him. Maharishi was so overjoyed, John said.
Maharishi said, yes, please go. If he accepts you as a disciple or a student, you'd be very lucky because he's very, very reserved, very reclusive. And whatever you publish, you must send me copies of those, those texts.
So John Hughes and his wife went to Kashmir in, in 1972, and, and they studied, and John recorded everything that, that every lecture that he attended. And he, he only intended to be there for one year, but at the end of one year, Swami Lakshmanjoo said, look, my tradition will be lost after I leave this world because I'm the last living master in this unbroken oral tradition.
If you could possibly ask Maharishi's permission that you could stay here and continue to study with me, record all of the important text, it would be a great blessing. And of course, Maharishi just openly gave his blessings. He said, absolutely, absolutely; because John was in the first MIU catalog. He was to go back to MIU and set up the program for Indology.
So John stayed for 20 years and recorded over a thousand hours of teachings, and they weren't -- you have to understand Swamiji was from an oral tradition, so he didn't, he didn't sit there and just give lectures. He took the text, the original text, which dated back some five, six thousand years ago. He would read from the text and then gave, give a translation of the verses.
And he said, this way you get the words that were spoken by Shiva to Parvati, or from Bhairava to Bhairavi. You get the original, text and, and therefore, he said, at a later date, somebody who listens to this or listens to these recordings will be able to hear the, the actual knowledge that's flowing through this, what's called a Sampradaya.
A Sampradaya means a lineage of masters that's unbroken. So I was used to that terminology because Maharishi's teaching, and the teaching of Transcendental Meditation, has its essence in what's called the Holy Tradition dating back to Narayana. Narayana, the first progenitor of, of the, the tradition of Vedanta or Vedantic philosophy, and flowing down through all of the masters to Shankara, down to Maharishi's own master who was Brahmananda Saraswati, who was the, the, the Shankaracharaya of Jyotir Math. So what Maharishi was teaching in TM was also coming from an unbroken lineage, an oral tradition being passed on.
So that was my introduction and I, in 1988 it was, after I'd been in Kashmir for six years, Swamiji said, okay, you have a, a background in Sanskrit, which will be very helpful. I want you to transcribe all the lectures that John has done into English, so that later they can be published as English translations of this teaching. And we've been doing that. I've been still working today with John Hughes very closely. In the last 30 years, we've published 12 different texts of Kashmir Shaivism, or at least 12 different chapters of different teachings, but all of them we present in the original format of transcripts with the audios because there was something magical after 20 years of listening to these audios over and over and then rechecking and making sure it was all correct.
I found there is, as was with Maharishi, a great transmission of knowledge that happens something beyond the words. Something that is deeper than just reading from a book. So, the same way today, Maharishi's teachings are presented in original lectures that he gave. So we also present the same way in, in Swami's teachings.
So that was my, that was my introduction to Kashmir Shaivism. It was more of a, a work, work hard, six days a week. And I was very lucky because I spent, I spent so much time in the ashram with, Swami Lakshmanjoo. It wasn't really an ashram, it's not an ashram in the true sense of the word. It's not somewhere where people come and stay in an ashram.
It, it was his house. And Kashmir had a very different system called matikas. If you wanted to come and study with a teacher in Kashmir, you had to be self-sufficient in where you lived. And he would invite you to his house once or twice a week to give talks. That was how it worked there, because the tradition, the tradition wasn't really a reclusive, renunciate tradition.
It was, it was basically a householder tradition where you lived your own life and became self-sufficient in your own world, and the teaching and the practices made you more self-sufficient in your own world. And very little reliance on the guru as a guru, more relying on him as a teacher, as a person who gave you enough knowledge to realize, to have your own realization, but live in your own world, with that realization.
Ron: That's a beautiful introduction and well begun is half done. In all those years, what aspects of that teaching really impacted you or influenced you or have stayed with you since then?
George: I would have to say that, when I first started, learning these Vedictexts, I became very interested in Ayurveda and started reading some of the books of Ayurveda, the Susruta Samhita, the Caraka Samhita. These are the two main books which, the, you know, written or at least penned down, somewhere around 600 BC.
But there were a lot of Sanskrit words, and that inspired me to learn Sanskrit. So I wanted to learn Sanskrit just to have the basics and read Devanagari. When I went to Kashmir and started to study with Swamiji, very quickly, one of the first books that he did in English -- the third chapter of that book was all about the Sanskrit alphabet, but it was about the Sanskrit alphabet in terms of it being a philosophy, not in terms of it just being a language, it was, it was, it was something that there was much more to than just learning Sanskrit as a language so that I could translate or I could read Sanskrit text. The essence of it was that it was a complete philosophy of every aspect of creation of life, in all of its, in all of its ramifications.
Ron: Can you elaborate a little bit on that, George, because this is fascinating. I mean, Sanskrit is of course the oldest language on earth and is considered the mother of all languages. It's also the language in which the Vedic literature is recorded. So when you say it's a philosophy and not a language, can you elaborate a little bit on that more? That's fascinating.
George: Well, you see there, it is, it's the oldest language, and as you say, it's the mother language. the Sanskrit word mata means mother, and, there are so many words in Sanskrit Pita, is, is father. There are so many derivatives of English and all other languages, especially German, and some Spanish, which have exactly the same word for a particular object, which is a Sanskrit word.
And Sanskrit, commonly it's known as Devanagari; Devanagari which means the language of the gods.
So, if we go back to the beginning of creation, in most of the Eastern traditions, we say in the beginning, there was Brahma, or in the beginning there was Narayana or whatever. And, and that's where creation started. Brahma, in Indology is known as the creator.
So, like being the language of the gods, how have they created the universe? Out of what? In the beginning for the, for the western scholar and the western mind, we say there was nothing, and then there was a Big Bang -- the Big Bang theory. And the Big Bang theory sounds really good for Western scientists. Everything expanded and the galaxies are still expanding.
But for the Eastern mind, they say, well, if God is eternal and eternal means not just a long time; it means eternal. Therefore there was no beginning and there is no ending. So if there's a Big Bang theory, there had to be a beginning, a with nothing before it.
Indology says, or at least the understanding of the Sanskrit alphabet, is that in the beginning there was just an ocean of consciousness -- consciousness vibrating within itself. There's an ocean like, but no waves on that ocean. It's just the ocean. And within that ocean, every drop of water was a potential world or a potential manifestation, but still nothing was moving. And somehow, according to Kashmir Shaiva philosophy, that ocean, the tides or the currents underneath started to move.
And from that, there was a, an interaction. In Shaivism, it's an interaction between masculine and feminine energy, because you get no creation anywhere without male and female. Without that, there is no creation. So there's, there was this interplay and interaction of between what's called Shiva and Shakti, or Shiva and Parvati, or the other terminology, Bhairava and Bhairavi.
And in that, sprang creation, Creation came out of that clashing, or the interplay, of these two energies. Just as you and I are here right now through the interplay of our parents, and everybody that's listening is only here because our mother and father came together, and this runs right through the whole, every living being, unless you're an asexual octopus or something like that, then that's a mystery for this, but okay, so in Sanskrit there are two aspects.
There's vowels and consonants. Just as we have in English, we have five vowels. We have 26 letters in our alphabet, but in Sanskrit there's 16 vowels, and there's 34 consonants. And, these together, coming together, the vowels and the consonants, make up the basis the basic building blocks of all creation.
Because in, in this whole idea is that everything has a vibration. Everything comes out of sound vibration. And the myriad of objects that we see around us, of which we name things, the names of those things, the letters which make up the names of those things are vibrational. we say vibrational, impulses that form the structure of the universe around us.
To me, that was fascinating. It was really, I, I thought, I also thought Sanskrit was just a language. And if I learn it, I'm gonna be able to read some of these ancient texts in their original, and suddenly this opened up a whole universe to me.
Ron: That's interesting, very interesting; that relates to the understanding that in Sanskrit there's a relationship of name and form, because the quality of the frequency of the sounds in Sanskrit equal the frequency of the object that they depict. And, that's basically what you're saying, in other words, isn't it?
George: Totally. Totally. And it's only in the last, well, it's in the last 10 or 15 years that people have delved directly into the whole idea of sound frequency. The first person in the western world that got into the, into the idea of sound frequency was Nikola te Tesla.
He understood very, very clearly that sound created vibration and vibration creates, has an effect, on form. Now it, it, the interesting thing is, is that now they're doing these different harmonics and finding each harmonic has a different shape. Each harmonic going through the different hertz of different sound frequencies, have different shapes.
Now, Indian philosophy, even in the, the music, aspect of Indian understanding, there are only eight notes, do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. And the classical singers in India sing these notes. In Kashmir Shaivism, it's very, very, it's a beautiful philosophy, that speech itself is sound.
You are making sounds, I'm making sound. How is everybody understanding what we're saying? We know we, we have language, but they say that when children are very young, up to the age of three years old, they don't know the different words and the different meanings.
Like you just said, the names and the forms of things. It's called Nama-Rupa in Indian philosophy. It's a very important thing -- the basis; that to every form, every rupa, there is a nama, there's a name. But children, up to the age of three years old... this I learned in one lecture given by Swami Lakshmanjoo, he said, they don't see the world like we do. They see the world and they see an interconnectedness between everything.
They don't differentiate one thing from the next because they don't nominate what they're looking at. Their vision, the vision coming out of their eyes is like the movie projector looking at the screen, but it's not breaking up all the parts.
Ron: They don't categorize the way we do as we get older.
George: Exactly. They see a dog, the dog is a four-legged thing moving across the floor. And a table is a four-legged thing that you're supposed to sit at and eat.
Ron: Right, right.
George: But they don't think table, dog, cat, until around the age of three, somebody mysteriously hands them a book, which has the alphabet and they start to learn A, B, C, D, E, F, G as we all did.
And, and in the west we, originally, we never learned it phonetically, we learned the alphabet as A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And that was my problem with English. I could not spell because the phonetics of the letters of the alphabet were not the same as when you wrote, spelled them in words. Anyhow, at three, they learn A, B, C. At five, when they go to school, they learn A for apple, B for boy, C for cat, D for dog.
And all of a sudden that thing that was moving across the floor is a dog. And it's different from the table. And it's different from C-A-T, the cat. So their world now is starting to get differentiated and broken up. And their undifferentiated perception of the world is, is fading into the background.
And that it's a very, it's just a way of learning to function in the world. You can't learn not to function in the world. And Swamiji once said, he said, actually, the enlightened yogi realize that they have to unlearn the, the, the what they're looking at.
In a, in an automatic way, that when they meditate and go to finer and finer and finer structures of the mind and thought itself starts to dis dissipate, they realize that the sentences which make up the world that we live in, and we all live in a world of structured sentences, the story of our life that we wake up to every morning. And those sentences they realize are made of, of words, and the words are made of letters. So they're going back through the opposite thing that they did as children.
And they're going back to a state of before the A, B, C, and for the enlightened yogi, they live in the world like children in the world. The innocence of a yogi. That's the first thing you can really use to, to see that the greatness of these teachers... is their innocence and childlike behavior because they actually are like children in the world.
Ron: There is, sorry to interrupt, an important difference between the immature innocence of a child and the innocence and spontaneity of a fully realized saint.
George: Absolutely, because they have now tapped into the source of all sound. And if you tap into the source of all sound, what you have then is a direct link with the source of all knowledge. This is why great masters who, even uneducated masters, have a complete spontaneous ability to, to just, emanate, answer any question about any particular text or any knowledge.
Anandamayi Ma, this one great lady saint in Kashmir [India], was the perfect example of that. Completely uneducated, but ask her any question on even the most, abstruse topic of the Vedas, and she would answer it immediately because she had gone back through that process, tapped into that ocean of consciousness from where everything came out. And therefore, spontaneously, she was living a state of what's called universal God consciousness.
Ron: And then you have access to the source of all knowledge, whether or not you've been educated in the traditional sense or not.
George: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this is, this has been the legacy of, of India, of Asian cultures, for for thousands of years. And there are still, there are Western scholars, western saints, who've also had these glimpses of these incredible, expanded states of consciousness. and, and it happens usually spontaneously, you know, and just to say that Jesus himself, the great Yogi, said, unless, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, unless you become like a child. What was he referring to there? Becoming innocent, going back to the source.
Ron: In your view, how are these teachings of Kashmir Shaivism, how are they applicable to our world today, and to someone who's seeking higher knowledge and seeking to develop their consciousness?
George: Okay. There was a, a wonderful talk where a lady asked Swamiji, so what is the difference between Kashmir Shaivism and most other traditions, religious traditions, and meditation traditions? And he said, well, they're basically similar. But what the Shiva masters have realized is that consciousness is always there in the background.
It's just subsided. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's not somewhere else. It's in the background. And we meditate, not so much to try to get consciousness out, but it's just the very process of meditation, the very desire to meditate, is somehow an impulse from consciousness to get out, for consciousness, to reveal itself from within.
Because we're always looking, we're always looking for things in the world to, to make us happy. Everybody wants to be happy. No one wakes up in the morning, says, I'm gonna be as miserable as I can today. That's not part of the human equation. Everybody wants to be happy, but we look for our happiness in the world.
And when we start to meditate or do any spiritual practice, we are looking for that consciousness. We're looking for that happiness within ourselves. It's called self-realization. That's why it's called, you know, we realize ourself. Kashmir Shaivism has the view that even just to have an impulse to think that way is a, is an a sign, a signal that grace has ascended, that there is some aspect of grace that has opened up your perception of the world and yourself to a greater possibility, a greater opportunity.
Ron: Right, right.
George: so grace is the motivating force behind anybody taking one step on the path of spirituality, whatever, what, whatever path that is. It's not unique to Kashmir Shaivism. There's no patent on grace. And grace can befall anybody at any time of life.
So the difference would be, and I think this is a quote from one of the, the, the Buddhist masters who said, we often think that we're conscious beings and we're human beings trying to have an experience of consciousness. He said, but the truth is we're consciousness having the experience of human beings.
Ron: And when that consciousness wants to wake up in a particular way, it does so through the mechanism of grace. And Kashmir Shaivism recognizes actually 27 different levels of grace; how 27 different levels of grace manifests differently. But Swamiji said, just to make it simple, I'll break it down to nine different levels of grace. And that grace comes from within, according to his teachings?
George: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
Ron: It's beautiful what you're saying because you're, we look for happiness. We don't wake up feeling, I want to be miserable, we want to be happy. So, we go through life, we seek happiness in objects. We start thinking, this will make me happy. That will make me happy. This person will make me happy. That acquisition will make me happy. This action will make me happy. That experience will make me happy. Eventually, we come to the realization that none of these things ever, ever provide any lasting happiness. Yes, some short term happiness perhaps, but nothing that endures. And eventually, I think through, as you said, grace, we start to seek that fulfillment within us. And that calling comes from within.
George: Yes, yes, the, the, the original wake up call, we can say. In my own case, you know, I was at, at, at the age of 17 or 18, I was surfing in Australia, I was playing music. I was doing all the things that you did in the sixties, listening to the Beatles music, doing what I, playing soccer, you know, coming from a great soccer family and everything.
And that was all there was. But suddenly I met two people, then there were two girls who were just unique. My God, they were vegetarians. And I was a ferocious carnivore; they were vegetarians, and they meditated, they did yoga. All the things that were totally foreign to me.
And they were things that only hippies did in those days, and you kind of stepped clear of hippies , but there was something very magical about them, apart from the fact that I was 17 and they were very attractive. They told me, they said, George, we have to tell you the truth. You are, you are lost and you have to find yourself.
And I said, straight away, I didn't know I was lost, where do I find myself? Where do I go? And they said, no, you could go to a commune, but you won't find yourself in a commune. You have to sit quietly and you have to meditate.
Ron: Hmm.
George: And it, it, it, it ran through... and they invited me to a group meditation; there were 20 people who had learned Transcendental Meditation. I wasn't even a meditator. It was a bit illegal, but they were living in a very remote part of Australia, Byron Bay actually, which is, which became very popular later on. It was a classic place, like, it was like the Berkeley of, of Australia, where all new, all new, you know, innovations came up.
And I sat in this room with 20 people sitting around with their eyes closed and thinking, this looks pretty stupid actually. But okay. And Lucy had told me, close your eyes. Just sit. And when I sat, I felt something was going on. I had no technique, but after 20 minutes, I went, wow, that was, that was interesting. So of course, three weeks later I learned Transcendental Meditation and that was the turning point.
So, the grace for me came from some out, seemed to come from outside, but the real grace come, came when I sat and I felt something happening inside me. You know, I felt something that there was, even though these people were sitting around a room quietly with their eyes closed, and I, my first thought was, this was pretty crazy, you know, but let me, let me just close my eyes and boom, I just, sunk into something that I... and I must admit, no, I have to connect that with, when I was very, very young, I used to have a very, very similar experience. Just a similar experience of a, of waking up in the morning and being able to go back to sleep and then going into a state where I was free of the body, free of the mind. I was just floating around in the sky and I could go back and forward in that state. I can still remember it very clearly. Even today.
Ron: So asleep but not devoid of consciousness.
George: Yes, it was a junction point, that was actually, I could fall into a junction point between being awake and going back into sleep or dreaming. And I could do it, very consciously. But that, that, of course, that faded away by the time I was four and five and, and had to get up and get ready for school and things like that.
The only way I could describe it was falling into a, an open sky and then being able to just float around in that sky of, of, of no thought. You know, just, yeah. No time, no space.
Ron: So what you're saying is being in that room with the other people who are meditating, their lively consciousness somehow precipitated that experience within you at the same time.
George: Absolutely. Absolutely. And when I first started to meditate, it just, apart from the fact that I had really, very, very deep experiences, it just made sense. It just, there was, there was, it was just, this was something that all human beings have, and I just felt gratitude that I was pushed in that direction to do it.
And I had a big, I mean, pretty soon I went back to Sydney where I was working, and within the next three or four months, I think about 45 people in our circle all learned to meditate. So we lived a, a, a half an hour, an hour drive from the TM Center, and it became a bit of a struggle to go every Sunday for group meditation.
We had bigger group meditations in my house than they did at the meditation center. So it was, it was something, and, and, you know, the Beatles happened and, and there was so many influences, but that, that idea, and I saw around all the people who started around me, there was a kind of grace that came into their life to, to give them the impulse to, to want to learn, to meditate.
Some of them became teachers of TM. I think I was the only one that really took a, a liking to, or a a, a passion to understand Indian philosophy. And that was also a natural, very natural thing. And once I realized that the, this Sanskrit alphabet, as we got back to that point was the, the building block of the universe,I just, I, I thought, wow, this is quite an amazing, amazing thing to understand Sanskrit, not just as a language, but as a philosophy.
Ron: And then you went on, you became a teacher of TM, and then having read the Shiva Sutras, that you said is what inspired you to go study Shaivism with Swami Lakshmanjoo, or had you met Swami Lakshmanjoo before that, or it was more the knowledge in the Shiva Sutras that drew you to him?
George: It was more the knowledge in the Shiva sutras. Yes. Yes. And, once I read the Sanskrit that went with the sutras, I realized, wow, these sutras were actually given to a great sage of Kashmir called Vasugupta. These sutras were given to him by Lord Shiva himself, somewhere around 800 CE, 800 in the Christian era.
Because Kashmir had been overrun with Buddhism and, you know, Ashoka for the second century. And the Shaivism, the pure Kashmir Shaivism that was there in, in the valley was disappearing. So he, he had a dream in which Lord Shiva appeared to him, the Lord Shiva in the form that we know him with the trident and, and everything, and, and Lord Shiva basically said very casually, what's your problem? And he said, well, you know, the real pure knowledge of Shaivism is disappearing. And Shiva said, well, look, go to this place, there's a beautiful valley, there's a stream there, there's a big rock in that stream.
And, and go there. And I've written some, I've engraved some Shiva Sutras, some teachings on that rock. Learn them, propagate them, and Kashmir, or wasn't called Kashmir Shaivism, but Shaivism, the teachings of Shiva will again flourish.
So he went to this place, it's a a, it's a, a forest called Dachigam. He found the rock, but no sutras. And he thought, oh, maybe it was just a dream. But when he leaned over and touched the rock with his hand, this rock lifted up, and underneath this rock, which is the size of a house, must weigh 200 tons; it lifted up and underneath were all of the sutras written out.
And in those days, they had photographic memories, you know, and he just, he memorized all these sutras. The rock came back down and that rock is still there today. That rock is revered as the rock of where the Shiva Sutras are written underneath. No one's been able to get a crane to lift 200, a 200 ton rock and see whether they're still there.
But yogis who know, who know the vibration of those places, know that this, this is the rock where the Shiva Sutras are written under.I'm going to do just at that point, it's a very good little thing, I'm going to share my screen with you, Ron.
Ron: Sure, sure.
George: Because when Maharishi first went to Kashmir, that was the text in 1966, he wanted to study the Shiva Sutras.
Ron: Uh-huh
George: With Swami Lakshmanjoo.
So they went through the Sutras, but at a certain point Swamiji said, well, out of respect, we should visit that place and see, and just feel the vibration there.
So that's a picture of Swami Lakshmanjoo and Maharishi standing barefooted. It's a picture of a picture, standing barefoot on Shiva rock in the Valley of Dachigam. They both went there with a, a few disciples that, that Swamiji had.
And that was 1966, and it, it coincided, Maharishi's visit coincided with the time of Swami Lakshmanjoo's birthday celebration. And at that time, they had a birthday puja, it's traditional in India. So, this is a slide of Swamiji, Maharishi, Devendra, sitting. Satyanand is just on on Swamiji's right hand side, but didn't get caught in the picture.
And you can see all the puja gear is set out. So they had a, um, they had a, a puja for Swamiji's birthday, and a, and a short meditation obviously afterwards.
That in itself, those Shiva Sutras, are still revered. Of course, in Kashmir, they are the foundational text of all the philosophy that Shiva wanted to put back on track,
Ron: I have a question for you in this regard. We know that the system of Indian philosophy known as Vedanta essentially teaches that consciousness is all there is, and that this appearance of the relative is, in its essence, pure consciousness, but it appears as a manifest creation.
Now, Shiva, in the Vedic text is considered to be one with the Absolute. He represents the Absolute, the pure consciousness. And is the teaching of Vedanta then similar or parallel to that of Shaivism? And does Shaivism also proclaim that essentially consciousness is all there is, and if so, in what terms does it describe it?
George: The teaching of Vedanta which is closest to, but not exactly the same, is called Advaita Vedanta. So, Advaita Vedanta, non-dual Vedantic philosophy. The very first sutra of the Shiva Sutras is caitanyam-atma,  caitanyam-atma, but atma doesn't mean the soul there.  Caitanyam-atma means everything is made of consciousness. Everything is is essentially made of consciousness. The very second sutra is, if that's true, then why don't we know that? If everything's made of consciousness, it should be very obvious. Why don't we know it? The second sutra is is jnanam bandha; knowledge is binding. Knowledge is both liberating and knowledge is both binding.
If you don't know undifferentiatedly, it's binding. If you know differentiatedly, if you are a professor of, of psychology, but you don't know about consciousness, it's also binding. So both ways, knowledge becomes binding. Not to know the truth is binding and knowing the untruth is also binding.
Ron: Right, right.
George: That's the very second Sutra. The third goes on to say that, well, I'm, I'm using Sanskrit terms here, yoni-varga kala-shariram, which means once you have a body and you attribute that body to yourself and you forget that the body is actually a manifestation coming out of this vibrational sounds, which come out from the ocean of consciousness, then you're on your way into a world of differentiation.
The fourth Sutras explains exactly how that happens; and how does that happen? Beautiful sutra, it's, Jnanadhistana Matrika. Okay. How it happens is Matrika is one of the goddesses of the Sanskrit alphabet. So how do we move into the world? We move into the world through the process of speech.
We move into the world by the process of the story that we tell ourselves in our head every day that we woke up.
Ron: Right, right .
George: But, but this Matrika is a very tricky, tricky goddess. Her main feature is play. She can play us whichever way she likes by creating situations where we lose our connectedness with the, this unbounded consciousness within each and every one of us. And we move into the world of differentiation. And she does it in three steps, three simple steps. She takes the letters, which make up words, and she takes the words which make up sentences, and she takes the sentences to create this reality of our life, which seems to be separate from consciousness.
So everything that we are talking about here right now, we're talking with, it's, it's sentences made of words, made of letters. And this is the whole point. This is how we learn. We learnt letters first, A, B, C, D, then we learned a word, and then we learned the sentences. This is a dog, this is a cat. I am a boy. And once we did that, we moved into this world of differentiation. So the very first five sutras of the Shiva sutras sum up the reality of creation and how it unfolds. And that to me, that when I got to the fourth sutra, which was the one on Matrika -- matri, again, meaning mother ma, mata and ka in Sanskrit is very interesting; it's an interrogative, it's a questioning. So she's the unknown mother. Nobody ever thinks about speech. Nobody ever thinks how we speak. Nobody ever thinks how thoughts form. How do we formulate a thought in our head in order to express it in terms of, you know, speech? And this was fascinating to me, that this whole idea and even Swami Lakshmanjoo would say, how do you formulate the pictures in your dreams? There's no screen there. There's no light on, you're in a dark room. You may even have the blankets over your head because it's winter, and yet you can spend half the night living a whole lifetime in a dream, and you see yourself driving down the road in the car, flying through the sky, going to the supermarket.
You see all those things. He said, where does the structure of that fabric of your dreams come from? That you create your own universe within yourself. Just as you create the universe when you open your eyes and wake up.
You create the universe around yourself. And the size of your universe is determined by how much you've traveled, how, how expanded your mind is, how, how much you've learned about how big the universe is.
The mind of a of a, a psychologist is within the field of psychology. The mind of a nuclear physicist is there. The mind of a cosmologist is out there in the, in, in the stars. We each create a boundary of the reality of our world by the, this external fabric of the mind. And we we project everything onto the mind; consciousness.
Ron: Which is something Maharishi explained beautifully when he just said two phrases. Knowledge is structured in consciousness, and knowledge is different in different states of consciousness. Our totality of knowledge, whatever we know of the world, of ourselves, of this discipline or that discipline, of the universe; it is structured within our consciousness and that knowledge will vary depending on the state of our consciousness. The knowledge that is in the dream state of consciousness -- totally illusory, has nothing to do with the knowledge of the waking state of consciousness. The consciousness of one individual dictates his or her reality different from the consciousness of another individual.
George: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's amazing. It's an amazing play. And it's called the play of consciousness. It, it's called, the, just the play of consciousness. And how we are caught in it, and yet in many ways, we are drawing on consciousness itself, to be alive, to live in the world.
So, so Indian philosophy that, I mean, the fascination with yoga, the fascination with, with meditation, the fascination with the philosophy; these are all stepping stones and attempts in a way just to understand the reality of our own state of being, what level of consciousness we're at, just what level of consciousness we, we are experiencing at any moment in time.
But we're always projecting the light of consciousness through our eyes into the world, and we're seeing a full picture, but the unfortunate thing is -- well, it's not really unfortunate, it is what it is -- we break everything up into, into portions and parcels by the names that we give to everything. It's, it's, it's, it's just the, the way that the human structure is there.
And a beautiful concept in, in Kashmir Shaivism is that Shiva and Shakti have stepped down from their universal state and willfully accepted themselves to become limited all the way down to becoming limited human beings.
Because without that, Shiva and Shakti would not be able to see the beautiful universe that they've created. They see the universe through our eyes.
Ron: This is
George: and that.
Ron: how consciousness knows itself.
George: Yes. Consciousness knows itself completely, and, the question always comes up about that. Okay, in the concept of Kashmir Shaivism, Shiva is said to be the light of consciousness.
It's called prakash. Prakash is a common word for light. And Shakti, or his energy, his feminine energy, is supposed to be the, it's called vimarsha, is supposed to be called the energy which can actually understand that consciousness, because consciousness itself is just an ocean of, just a pure ocean of, of energy.
When the energy rears up, it looks at itself. And Swamiji, he said it very simply in those same terms. He said, prakash is the light of consciousness, vimarsha is the consciousness of that light. These are two... the same thing. You can't separate the masculine and feminine of Shiva and Shakti. They're always interconnected and when they disconnect, they seem to be separate.
When, when Shiva and Shakti push themselves out into the world and become us, then we seem to be separate. But we're never actually separate. We're never actually separate, and we draw our life from them in terms of our breath. Every, every living being breathes; some more, more quickly than others.
The ones that breathe very slowly live for a very long time. The tortoise that lives for 500 years, they take one breath every half an hour or so. You know, the in inward breath and outward breath. So this connectedness with consciousness is also greatly connected to our breathing. And that's why, in meditation, when your mind settles down, your breathing also starts to become more and more and more refined, much more refined, until you get to a state where you enter what's called the breathless state.
And if you become familiar with that state, you enter a state which is called samadhi, the state of complete, pure, pure consciousness without any thought and without the movement of any breath. That's, that's the essence of how consciousness gets connected with the world.
Ron: Does Shaivism provide techniques for experiencing samadhi and developing consciousness, or is it based entirely on understanding and intellectual knowledge?
George: Good question. It's actually based on both. There are two, aspects of Shiva, we can say, experience. One is called purusha jnana -- the knowledge that we can, the, sorry, the direct experience that we have in this world. And the other one is called bauddha jnana. So these two words simply mean my direct experience and my understanding of what I'm experiencing.
Okay, so everybody has that. In any part of your life, you have an experience of something; if you don't understand what's happening, you get confused. If you do understand what's happening, you're very clear about what's happening. There's no confusion, no doubt.
So in, in Shaivism, this, the inner experience is based on your meditation practice, your diving within yourself, going to much deeper states of your own state of being, and going beyond the state of, of normal thinking process.
The external part of that is to study and understand the mechanics of how the body and the mind work together. How they function together and how, what is the reality? How is the mind working? How is the ego working? How is the intellect working? How do they relate to the, the world around us... the five elements. This is the learning side, or the intellectual side, which in Kashmir Shaivism says it, it actually substantiates and holds your experience much more fully. It holds your experience, and therefore you tend not to slip back.
Ron: In other words,
words,
George: Many people...
Ron: you mean the, the intellectual understanding, it helps reinforce the commitment to the practice and therefore, in some way enables the practice to grow deeper through understanding.
George: Yes, yes. Just as Maharishi said, knowledge is different in different states of consciousness. There's a great theory in Indian philosophy that, that the more you know, the more you enlightened you become; that knowledge is the cause of liberation. In Shaivism it says, knowl, knowledge itself is liberation.
Because once you get to the pinnacle of all knowledge, that knowledge doesn't turn into information, it turns into a state of being. That knowledge becomes consciousness. So it says that knowledge, the knowledge itself can liberate you and in the end the knowledge itself becomes liberation. The knowledge itself is liberation.
Ron: That reminds me of that verse in the Bhagavad Gita, which says, even a little of this knowledge delivers one from great fear, because it, it provides the intellectual understanding of the totality of life.
George: Exactly, exactly. It's just because, and, and, knowledge when somebody becomes, what we say in Australia, a full bottle on his subject. Okay, he's learnt everything. He's a mechanic and he's a, he's the best mechanic because he knows everything about how cars work. Or, he's a, he's a nuclear physicist. He knows everything about that. He's a quantum physicist. He's reached the pinnacle.
But at the same time, I'm often confronted with such people and I ask them, wow, you really have reached you, you've got a PhD in so many things. How does the mind work? How do you formulate thoughts? Where do your thoughts come from?
Where do the impulses for a new idea come from? And most of them are baffled. They go, oh, yeah. So, and I have a friend who is a, he's a quantum mathematician. And he's delving into all of these things of string theory and everything. We used to sit in Los Angeles in a coffee shop there, in Culver City, and he would pick my brains about the Sanskrit alphabet.
And I said, look, just if you, if you understand the vowels and the consonants of Sanskrit, you'll have the whole avenue of quantum mechanics. You'll understand quantum physics because these are the, these are the building blocks of sound, which make it up. And I said, if you look at just 12 of the 16 vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet, they clearly explained string theory. Vibrations that vibrate against one another.
And then they get up to the 10th or the 11th, and they fall into a state where everything gets reabsorbed back into itself. And there's no, there's only one vibration instead of 10 different vibrations of strings. This is the vowels. This is the vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet. Just, a, aa, e, i, u, oo, you know, taking out the ri-rii-li-lii, a, i, o, l.
There's 12 vowels in the Sanskrit alphabet. They're so profound. I I'll just share an experience I had once. In 19, in 2000 and six, we had the centenary celebration of Swami Lakshmanjoo's life. Swamiji left this world in '91. He was born in 2006, 2007. So this was the hundred year celebration, and we invited scholars from all over India that.
Ron: He was born in... 1906...
George: ...born nineteen, 1906, sorry, 19, 1907 actually. But India's had that, they do everything, they say the first year of your life is actually also, you're not, you're zero to one, but it's a year.
Ron: Right, right.
George: So instead of being 74, you're actually 75, you know. So, 2006 we're the, in this beautiful big auditorium in Delhi, five, six hundred people seated. I was one of the organizers.
We invited scholars from all the different disciplines, Sanskrit scholars from Varanasi, from, Benares. And I was excited because I was gonna give a talk on the Sanskrit alphabet, on the third day. It would be the final day. But if you, if you're familiar with these kind of conferences, they have a big lunch for everybody.
And the worst thing you can have is to be the speaker directly after lunch, because everybody falls asleep. At least half your audience, you're going to lose.
Ron: Right, right.
George: So I organized for a dear friend who'd lived in India for 40 years, Mark Dyczkowski, written a number of books on Shaivism, a very dynamic speaker. I said, Mark, do you mind doing after lunch on the third day, the first, it's, he, each of us had an hour lecture.
He said, no, I'll be fine with that, because he knew that he could keep an audience awake. And I was the chairman for that particular session.
And at 1:30 or two o'clock when it was supposed to start, there's no Mark Dyczkowski, he's not anywhere to be found. And he was a bit of, a bit of a rogue. He'd gone off to Connaught Place to have a coffee or done something and obviously couldn't get a taxi back.
So, we are waiting there 15 minutes. So somebody just said, George, you do your talk. And I went, oh my God, this is the big one. So I, I went onto the stage. I said, look, Mark is obviously not here. Our apologies. He will talk, he'll be, he'll get here, but I will shift everything forward and I'll do my talk. I'm thinking there, I'm gonna go, I'm going to lose half the audience.
Sanskrit isn't an easy language to talk about to a general audience. And I said, well, with due respect to all of the, the erudite scholars we have sitting here in the front row, and there were about 10 or 15 real, I mean eminent Sanskrit scholars.
I said, I'm going to do a little something very different. Since my talk is about Sanskrit. I'm gonna do a call and response of the Sanskrit alphabet with everybody. This is what they do in a Guru Kula for the first year. The teacher walks around just chanting the alphabet and you chant after.
So there I was a little nervous, but I knew, I think, by the grace of Shiva and the Devis of the Sanskrit alphabet, it would be okay. So I started, a-aa-i-ii-u-uu, and the scholars in the front looked at me like, oh my God, what's he doing? Here's a western guy trying to teach us Sanskrit. And I could feel this crowd shuffling. And that was out of 500 people, there were 50 people at... I said, okay, that's not good enough. Okay, let us, let us all just give up everything we know for the moment.
Be innocent like children and just follow and recite with me. We're only gonna do the alphabet once. So then when they heard that, okay so, a-aa-i-ii-u-uu, and about 300 people in the audience just all recite, a-aa-i-ii-u-uu.
And it was, something magic happened. I said, that was good, but there's still another half the audience are not, so let us go. So we went through the vowels, and then I would do, ri-rii, li-lii, and I said, excuse me for the mispronunciation, but northern, south and all this. Then we did that.
Then we got to the consonants. I said, okay, consonants, ka-kaa-ga-gaa-na.
And by then there were 500 people all reciting call and response. And we finished the whole 50 letters at the alphabet and everybody was sitting up straight. The whole place just felt like it had just been spring cleaned. And I said, okay, let's do that again. And nobody said no. We did it. We did the whole alphabet again, call and response.
And we did it, we did it three times. And at the end, there were 500, 600 people sitting in absolute pin drop silence, just... And all the scholars in the front row that were kind of laying, they're all, everyone was sitting up straight. And I left it for five minutes in si, in that silence. I never said a word. And I just said, well, that's the end of my lecture, are there any questions?
And it was absolute proof that we, we are structured, the physi physiology of every living being is structured in the sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet because everybody, nobody fell asleep. No one was complaining, and I, I basically could put the microphone down and just walk off the stage and say, that's it.
Ron: That's fantastic. That's fantastic.
George: And this is what my Sanskrit teacher did for six weeks, when I first... I wouldn't have done it had I not have known that. And that Swami Lakshmanjoo said, if you really want to understand Sanskrit, become Sanskrit, become the letters of the Sanskrit, because they are the structure of your body. And I already knew by this, there's a practice called nyasa, where you contemplate even, you can recite the letters of the alphabet and you contemplate where they exist in different parts of the body.
And it's a beautiful practice. It's, it's a practice that centers you. And in fact, in Kashmir Shaivism, when a teacher finds there's a very sincere student who is not experiencing the consciousness that they aspire to experience... they're not going in deep into transcendental consciousness.
They've been meditating wholeheartedly, but they don't seem to be getting the result that they, had aspired to achieve. The guru would then give them these practices of nyasa and say, okay, forget your practices for some time. Just practice these sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet, enliven those vibrations within you.
And everybody that did that would find that their meditation improved.
Sometimes we can't, we can't transcend because of our intense grip and identification with the body. Identification that I am my body, but actually I am my body. I'm George, you're Ron. All of your audience are whoever they are.
But, the reality is, is that underlying who I think I am is this absolute beautiful metrics of vibrations, of different energies, of different deities, of different devas. It's a very important part, a very, a very salient part of Kashmir Shaivism that we are made, every cell in our body is like a god and a goddess. And the interaction of Shiva and Shakti at the highest level is happening not only in our lives, but even at the microscopic level within our body.
Ron: In your years with Lakshmanjoo, in your study of Sanskrit and these different aspects of Shaivism, were there any particular teachings or aspects of your life as a disciple that you found particularly challenging?
George: Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because everybody feels that when you spent, say 10 years of your life around an enlightened master, that it must have been a bed of roses. But no, I know, and you also know, you spent a lot of years around, directly, involved intimately, around Maharishi. And it seems that there are certain times within that period where you get, really overwhelmed by your own emotional baggage that comes up out of nowhere.
You know, we don't know. Out of nowhere. It seems out of nowhere, but, we, it's, it's, I call it the ca the the check-in luggage that we didn't realize when we came into this world. We knew about our carry-on luggage when we were born, and we, but there's a lot of this with luggage that we checked in and suddenly a bag of that opens up and we go, whoa, what's happening? Where did that come from?
And these are the trials and tribulations on the spiritual path that everybody has and that we have to tolerate. We tolerate them with patience knowing that this too will pass. Or we, we just, we up our time in doing asanas, or we be careful how much we're involving ourselves in the world which is not conducive to our present state of spiritual progress.
Everybody knows what is right and wrong for themselves because we are our own teacher. Ultimately, we're our own teacher, and I would ask Swami a lot of questions in the beginning and then I realized that he didn't like people just asking questions out of place. I soon learned to be really quiet around him and speak when I was spoken to, and, but he tolerated my questions at first so he could teach me that lesson.
And one day he said, it's part of the teaching of Shaivism... there's a concept that everybody is their own guru. And he said, because you know the answer to all the questions that you're asking. You know the answer to all your doubts, but you're impatient to get them all right now.
He said, you just have to be patient and realize that eventually, all of the answers to your questions will come from within you. And I said, how so? He said, okay, you asked me a question about a year ago. I gave you the answer, and you didn't really accept it. You didn't really accept that answer. You thought about it deeply for a long time. And then suddenly it dawned on you the answer was what I said, but you were looking at it in a different perspective.
So that answer came from within you, even though I told you, he said, that answer came from within you because there is the quality that that Shiva and Shakti live within you as you, not as somebody else. They live in you as you. And all the answers to all your questions are internal.
Therefore, meditation is the most important thing, coincided with study, study of meditation that upholds your experience as you progress
Ron: That's beautifully expressed. Beautifully expressed, because the teaching isn't really imparted in the words. It's, it's in-between the words. And it reminds me of something I read, I think it was from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, and he said, the outer teacher, the outer guru, he shows you the way, but the inner guru is the one who takes you all the way to your realization, much like you were just saying about Shiva dwelling within
George: And, and in the end, Swamiji said, you know, the first experience that a yogi or a yogini, a, a lady or a man have, when they reach the first stage of true enlightenment? He said, they laugh. They're overwhelmed. It's called camatkara. They're amazed that it was always there. It was never absent.
It was always there. I always was enlightened. What was ignorance? What was that? He said they, and they walk around kind of dumbfounded for days going, my God, what was that? And they said, they're doubly amazed at how everything works. Nothing works the way they thought it did. They see the pattern.
They see the pattern of, of these flowing out of letters, words, and sentences sprouting out from people. When they ask questions, they feel, they feel the impulses of, of, with just the subtlest, emanations of consciousness coming out, expressing themselves in the world. And eventually they feel, my gosh, I feel really full. And the world is really full, but I feel like I've created my own reality from birth.
Ron: Absolutely. Absolutely.
George: And then he said, when that develops even more and more, they go, oh, wow, not only have I created my own reality, I am the reality I've created. There are phases within the, this development of consciousness.
Even the first stages of enlightenment are overwhelmingly blissful. When somebody said, how do you know? How can you, you could be fooling yourself when you know, people say, oh, I'm enlightened. And, and we were in a group of people, he said, but how do you know if it's real? And Swamiji said, the bliss is overwhelming.
The bliss and the joy is overwhelming. And he called it, he said, it's called, it's super sexual joy. And they went, huh? He said, imagine what the joy of sex is. This is a billion times more intense. And the yogi is so overwhelmed with that bliss. They just, they don't know what to do. He says, people so often think that a person who is recently got enlightened is gone mad or is intoxicated.
They're intoxicated with the bliss and the joy of everything they see. And sometimes, he says, it takes a few months for them to put their feet back on the ground. And they can't express it to anybody. If somebody asks them what's happening to you, they just start laughing.
Ron: Right, right.
George: You know? So it's, it's, yeah, it's, it is what it is.
You know. It's…
Ron: Beautiful. I think we've gone on a bit long, but there is one question more I'd like to ask and hopefully it can be answered briefly, but we'll see. In the Vedic literature, we talk about the enormous scale of time and the repetition of the cycles of the yugas, which are, go on for years and years and years, thousands and millions of years. At the end, it said, Lord Shiva, dances the dance and brings about dissolution, the destruction -- only to be latent and dormant and to emerge again. What does Shaivism say about that? The role of Krishna in the dissolution of the universe?
George: Krishna and Shiva. Yes. Well, first of all, you, but you started with Shiva and you went to Krishna, so that's good. Yeah, yeah. Well, in Kashmir Shaivism, and this is not very well digested by the Vaishnavas, it says Shiva and, and Krishna are one and the same, because, and the point there, there's two aspects of time.
You see there is time in sequence, and there's non-sequential time, so it's called krama and akrama. So, what you have is, everything happening simultaneously in one moment, the whole universe. And then you also have everything happening in sequence. This is happening like the yugas are time in differentiation.
So, this is what happens, Swamiji said, one of the, one of the, first realizations when you get to that deepest state of meditation is time doesn't exist. Time is a,is a, a figment of our imagination in the way, this is what's brought it about beautifully in the Yoga Vasishtha, that, that beautiful story of King Padma and Leela.
And so, time, time appears as long as our mind is differentiated and one thing is different to another. And that's why children live in a timeless space. They're not considering I have to sleep now, or this is time to rest, or they're just living for that first three years in a timeless zone of unbounded perception, unbounded perception.
And we break it up. We break time up into our 24/7 that we live in because, that's how we have to function in our limited world, in our limited consciousness. For yogis, and people who have this elevated consciousness, it's very unusual, very, how they live in a timeless zone. And the first sign is, is that they don't sleep very much.
When they do sleep, maybe an hour or two, their restfulness is so deep, they can go again for the next 22 hours nonstop. You experienced that with Maharishi; I experienced it with Swami Lakshmanjoo. He would sleep sometimes for a half an hour, and then expect you to get up again now, and do, and do that day after day after day.
So time is very much a relative thing. And that's why when we transcend time, we also transcend differentiation. We transcend the differentiation of one thing being different to the other. And I remember a beautiful thing that Swamiji, he said, you know how time is created? Time is created when you fill your house up with things.
He said, when the universe is empty of things, there is no time. When Shiva and Shakti decide to fill the universe up with things, time is created by the distance between two things. It takes you an hour to get from here to there. He said, if there's nowhere to go, if you are already everywhere, as the enlightened, universal state of consciousness, you know the yogi who's in that state, they're already everywhere.
And they're everywhere in the sense of, that there's no distance to travel. He used to say to me, he said, you sit down to meditate and you think that one day, like the donkey with the carrot, one day I'll reach enlightenment because it's out there somewhere. And he said, it, I don't know where you get that impression.
Maybe because you pray for, he said, you pray for our father who art in heaven. Because Swamiji went to a Catholic school, but he was a young, he went to the Catholic school in Srinagar. So he remembered all the prayers. He said, and you think you sit to meditate, that God is in some seventh heaven. He said that idea you have to get rid of.
He said, when you sit to meditate, you have to just sit quietly first, and feel that that consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, God is emanating in all directions from your own heart, from inside yourself, not outside, and feel that time doesn't exist. There is no past, there's no present, there's no future.
There is an eternal moment in time, which we call the present moment, but, and then he said, even when we think this is the present moment, we think of it in terms of future and past. But if there is no future and there is no past, the present moment is just really this eternal, eternal expansion of all time, all space.
He said, if you sit down to meditate with that thought in mind first, you won't get lost in the world. Because the moment you drift off, you've moved from the present moment into past or future. I'm either planning in my mind what I've got to do next, oh, come back to the mantra, or come back to the breath, or whatever your practice is, and you take a few breaths, you recite your mantra and the next minute you're there, oh, I did that yesterday.
So we are continually getting dragged out into the past or the future or, and that we keep coming back to the present moment. Every time we remember that we've drifted off. And that's the whole process.
We do that for a long time until eventually the mind settles down with going here and there, and we stay more focused, more one pointedly, in an effortless way. And it's all about awareness, and one pointedness of practice, no matter what your practice is, whether it's mantra practice, whether it's japa, whether it's practice of observance of the breath, anything like that.
So, time, time starts to spread out and we seem to have more time.
Ron: And, in, in what sense are you relating that to the dissolution?
George: Well, the dissolution is such that, when the, when ignorance is dissolved, when ignorance is dissolved, they say that the enlightened person doesn't, isn't reborn, okay. Doesn't come back into a body, because they've done everything they had to do. For so many millions of incarnations, whatever it is, 8.4 million incarnations from the time we fall out of pure consciousness and merge back into it.
So that timeframe is there. But when it happens for the enlightened person, you realize that this dissolution and creation is happening simultaneously. It's not that everything falls up and then there's nothing. If that was the case, there would be an end to creation.
Dissolution happens on smaller and smaller levels. Like they say, they say that the yugas have 71 rounds of the yugas, which are called manvantras. There's 14 manvantras, and in each the 14 manvantras, there are 71 rounds of the yugas that happen. That's pretty a long time, but that's one day of Brahma.
And Brahma lives for a hundred years, and his hundred years of one day of Vishnu, and Vishnu lives for a hundred years.
And Vishnu's hundred years, is just the blinking of the eye of Shiva. He blinks and he opens and closes his eyes, and everything is dissolved. But it's continually dissolving. It has to be, because creation is ongoing. It isn't, there isn't an end to creation. So wherever we are...
Ron: This is what I wanted to get at, right. That it's...
George: Yes.
Ron: ...it's a dissolution of types, but it's not the end of creation.
George: There can't be an end because there was no beginning. If there was a beginning and an end, then, then it's not infinite, it's not eternal.
Ron: It all occurs within consciousness itself, eternally.
George: Yes, yes.
Ron: The internal dynamics of consciousness. Beautiful, beautiful answer.
George: And one, one great master who I always like to mention, Abhinavagupta. He was a master of Shaivism 1200 years ago, and he had all the experiences. He went and studied every tradition. Once he got his ray of enlightenment, he said, I must now compare everything that I know and everything I experience with every other tradition.
He went to Buddhists, he went to Vaishnavas, he went all around the gamut, and then he went within himself and he discovered the microcosm of the macrocosm -- that his own body was a universe within itself. Every cell. And he said, I discovered that there are 118 worlds that we, of our known universe, known universe. He said, I discovered within my meditation, I went to all these worlds.
I saw them. I saw the beings living in these world, rarefied beings like so many Brahmas, so many Vishnus, so many Rudras, living in different levels of creation. Down to the hells, I went to the hells. I saw 133 levels of hell. He said, and at the end of it, I saw this whole thing, the how this universe that we know of is 118 worlds.
He says, and then I had this experience. He said, oh my God. He said, now I feel that everything I saw was just one bubble in the ocean of Shiva's consciousness.
Ron: Wow.
George: Everything I saw was just one bubble in the ocean of Shiva's infinite consciousness. Then I humbled myself. He said, I thought I knew it all, and I realized, he said, I know nothing.
I'm just scratching the surface.
Ron: Beautiful, beautiful.
George: Yeah.
Ron: George, it's always such a pleasure speaking with you. We could go on for hours, but I think space-time boundaries are impinging upon us and I think we'll have to close this session. I hope we'll do another one soon. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for taking time and sharing these experiences with all of us.
George: What I'm sharing with you is based on everything that I absorbed from Swami Lakshmanjoo, not just in the years of, 20 years of transcribing. But in the eight years, or six years of working in the ashram, being somewhere close to somebody who, he taught me so many practical lessons of, of just how simple and how uncomplicated life should be; we complicate it.
And just how to keep, keep our life simple, straightforward, meditate every day. Never miss your practice. Study something, and, and come to the realization that you are God. He had this beautiful quote that, that God and the individual are one. To realize this, is the essence of Kashmir Shaivism and is the essence of all spiritual practice.
Ron: Beautiful. Thank you, George.