Shaiva Shakta Tantra: Awakening as Aesthetic Appreciation
Through practicing in different spiritual traditions, I realized that those paths and teachers that connected with me most deeply were those that had a rich sense of art & aesthetics. As someone who did not think of himself as an artist or even creative, this desire was not apparent to me at the outset. However, quite early in my spiritual journey, I had the good fortune to become initiated into the path of Kashmir Shaivism, an expression of Nondual Shaiva Shakta Tantra from Northern India.
The pre emininent figure in this tradition, a polymath named Abhnivagupta, is actually one of the most notable figures in India history for developing theories around art & aesthetics. For Abhnivagupta, the goal of spiritual practice was not only a freedom that was purely transcendent, but also immanent. For Abhnivagupta, meditation is about appreciating the dynamic unfolding of the play of consciousness. We are becoming a kind of connoisseur to open fully to all of the various rasas, or the flavors of human experience, including turning towards those flavors of experience which we find most terrifying and exhilarating. We’re turning towards, and learning to surf, the subtle energies underlying these emotions that animate the dynamism of consciousness and power our personal transformation.
Abhinavagupta emphasized spiritual practice as a process of refinement, not only of one’s character and actions, but of one’s capacity for aesthetic appreciation. The various flavors of experience subsumed within the play of consciousness were not only something to notice with nonattachment and equanimity, but rather to revel in. Shaiva Shakta Tantra offers an affirmative view of beauty, the body and the senses. It is a path that invites us neither to turn away from the world nor to transcend worldly desires, but to embrace life’s possibilities, to dance in both the light and the shadows.
Shakta Tantra opened me to the potency of contemplative practice not only as a science of the mind, but as a form of aesthetic appreciation.
When we approach awakening only as a science, only through the rationality of the cognitive mind, our meditation practice loses its juiciness. This approach can also cut us off from an embodied sense of intuition that is essential for discerning challenging choices in life. Through both meditation and plant medicine, we are building the capacity to hold the paradox of our needs and desires.
To offer a slight twist on Kierkegaard: life is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced.
Opening to this mystery does not mean abandoning reason, blind submission to authority or giving away our power, but rather recognizing that we can orient to life in different ways at different moments: as both a science and as an art, as a problem to be solved and in other moments as a mystery to be lived. The Tantrikas of the Shaiva Shakta traditions intimately understood the power of consciousness to create reality. They viewed the universe as a work of art and the gift of our precious life as an opportunity to weave meaning within it. Cutting through the veil of our default egoic sense of separation, waking up to the interconnectedness of life, attuning to the subtle loving, pulsating energy woven into the fabric of reality—this is the promise of nondual Tantric practice.
This is not meant as a metaphysical claim about what is true about the universe in an objective, scientific sense, but as an invitation to investigate the veracity of this claim within your own immediate experience. Through various yogic practices, from asana to mantra, meditation to plant medicine, we are making the body-mind more refined, more sensitive to the subtleties of the various flavors of experience. Like polishing a grain of rice to make sake, the coarse outer layers are removed, revealing a smooth, polished essence.
Since consciousness is fundamentally a subjective experience, I find that awakening is more of an art than a science. We can’t simply study consciousness the same way that we study the brain. “Truth” has a different meaning between the first and third person perspectives. The brain is an object, which is to say that it has a location in time and space. We can identify its boundaries. We can measure it.
But if I asked you to point towards the center of consciousness, where would you point? Could you point to the center of the sky? Or to its edge?
What Shaiva Shakta Tantra adds to The View of Vajrayana Buddhism (Dzogchen, Mahamudra): the goal is not only liberation and connection, but also aesthetic appreciation.
Since consciousness is fundamentally a subjective experience, I believe that meditation and awakening to the true nature of the mind is more of an art than a science, though admittedly this also speaks to my own aesthetic sensibilities and impulses for artistry that Tantra only helped to reveal with time and practice.
This also informs my view of what spiritual practice is about at its core: to discover the gifts of your own artistry, to open to how the creative energy behind the life force of this universe wants to move through you.
Recognizing our place within the mandala of life, the ways in which all of us are intimately interconnected, Tantra as a contemplative technology (yoga postures, meditation, mantra, plant medicine, whatever your practices) is about refinement. While this certainly implies sharpening and stabilizing our attention, refinement also entails bringing this sense of aesthetic appreciation, of savoring life as a play and as a dance. The yogic tradition is built on archetypally masculine qualities of discipline and mastery. Awakening is about summitting the mountain. But Shaiva Shakta Tantra weaves in these archetypally feminine qualities of playfulness and beauty, embodiment and dance. This approach can teach us how balance these forces within ourselves. Tantra invites us to integrate spiritual practice and worldly desires, to play with the paradox of our conflicting needs and desires.
Why do we have this impulse to awaken to our true nature? Why do we have the impulse to create art? How are these two questions related?
That feels like asking: why does fire burn? It is simply the nature of fire to burn. Just as creativity is the natural union of intelligence and energy of the universe taking form through us. Or why consciousness stirs with the impulse to wake up and recognize itself.
This intersection of spirituality and creativity lies at the heart of Tantric practice, in particular in the Shaiva Shakta traditions.
As a practitioner in this tradition what is remarkable to me is how the potency of plant medicine such as Soma and Ayahuasca naturally aligns with this Tantric path.
In the Rig Veda, Soma is an intoxicating entheogenic elixir. The Ayahuasca analog called Soma, a combination of Peganama Harmala (Syrian Rue) and DMT, is psychoactive, but it not the kind of intoxicant that invites one into stupor like alcohol, but rather a sacred medicine that lifts the veil of egoic separation. It opens us to the ecstasy that comes from finding and sharing your gifts in life and helping other people to find theirs.
Can people relate to these medicines as an escape from their problems? If people can do this with social media or Netflix or any number of other behaviors, of course this is true for psychedelics. This is in part why the intention and The View that we bring to plant medicine is critical. For me, the important questions are: is this practice bringing me into deeper engagement with what matters most in life? Art and creativity? Health? Relationships with myself, nature, loved ones? Am I learning to listen more deeply to what matters or am I engaging in this practice to drown things out that I don’t want to hear?
A person has to look closely and honestly within their own experience to answer these questions, while remaining open to the feedback of close family, friends and mentors who are thoughtful, open minded and have their best interests at heart.
Like yoga asana, meditaiton and mantra, for some people Soma and Ayahuasca can be a skillfull means for advancing along a Tantric path with its triadic goal: freedom, connection and aesthetic appreciation. The goal is not to be found somewhere else nor something to attain. Nor do we have become someone else. It is awakening more intimately to the beauty of this moment, not only the ecstasy of a DMT journey but the softness with which a flower blooms or the quietness with which a cherry blossom falls to the ground. Like other facets of Tantric practice, plant medicine can be an invitation into greater refinement of our senses, to appreciate beauty in life in increasingly subtle ways and to elevate artistry that opens the heart-mind.
This is the point of Tantrik practice in the Shaiva Shakta tradition: to become rasikas. To savor the rasa, the flavor, the juicyness of life. The point is not only transcendence (the mountain top, the cave, the forest), nor even to alleviate suffering (the Bodhisattva ideal) but to revel in aesthetic rapture (an art gallery, a concert, a fashion show). Though the Buddhist Tantras incorporate some of these Dionsysian elements, Shiva and Shakti speak more directly to these impulses within the unconscious. This is in part because Shaiva Shakta Tantra does not share the renunciate origins of Tantric Buddhism, which began with the ascetic context in which the historical Buddha emerged. These early yogic traditions had an overwhelmingly masculine archetypal approach to practice, emphasizing transcendance, eschewing worldy desires, including sexuality and romantic relationships, building wealth, creating art and appreciating beauty.
This Tantric invitation to delight in the play of the universe as it unfolds through consciousness builds on earlier Hindu ideals, which envisions this universe as a form of lila, or divine play. Tantra builds on this sensibility and imagines the universe as a giant tapestry in which we’re weaving our artistry, inseparable from the beauty and horror of creation and destruction.
An open source approach to awakening allows us to leverage all of the resources of wisdom traditions, from the earliest teachings of the Buddha up through the Tantras of both Vajrayana and other traditions such as Shaiva Shakta Tantra. It also gives the permission both to acknowledge the original source of these teachings and the cultures that developed and built on this code at various points across time and place, and to iterate on this software ourselves.
The universe is dynamic so how could tradition be static? Consciousness is dynamic. The ego is the experience of veiling this fundamental essence so that we forget our true nature: as “consciousness” inseparable from “the universe.”
Through archetypes and iconography like Shiva and Shakti, art allows us to awaken to our true nature, using metaphors to point towards what is true beyond concepts, as the the wave inseparable from the ocean. Waking up to the intrinsic freedom and intimacy that is always and already available, we then have the opportunity to savor the sublime in both ordinary and extraordinary moments.
Weaving art and aesthetics into The View that we bring to the practice of meditation and plant medicine is what allow us to transform our experience. Art allows us to weave the tragedy and grief inherent in the human experience into beauty and purpose. Tantra is about recognizing this precious opportunity to love, to create and to connect, to make an offering back to the universe through our artistry. It is through the path of Tantra, of looming and weaving, through creativity and artistry, that we honor the precious gift of a life that we have been given: a gift that we did nothing to deserve.
So you might say the question that sparks spiritual seeking is: how do we lose sight of this simple truth? How do we remind ourselves to stay intimately in contact with a sense of awe and wonder and beauty?