The Shakti Gate

The Eastern paths of spirituality are all in agreement that our original sin is ignorance. What we are ignorant of is who we are. We have a false idea of our identity. Simply by overcoming that false idea, we are immediately transported into a different energy field. It is as if we are traversing an inter-dimensional portal. Crossing the boundaries of the ego identity enables us to be in a much vaster field of Being, a field of grace.

The more that gateway is open to you, open to your awareness, and the more you are able to move in and out of ego consciousness, rather than being petrified in an identify that is rigid and unquestionable, the more through that portal will rain in, just as in a great rainstorm, the rays of divine grace. This is called Shaktipat in the Kashmir Shaivite Yoga tradition. The gaze of an illumined sage can transmit Shakti, but the source of Shakti is really always within. It is the divine love in the Heart of every being. Open the Shakti Gate and Liberation is here and now.

The only thing that differentiates one seeker from another is the amount we open that door to the divine love-bliss to come in. The more we are willing to receive the Shakti, the more that the energy field that is beyond the ego enters into the field of consciousness and explodes the ego from within. It is then that we realize that all along we were nothing other than the Ultimate Being, whether known as Shiva or Sat or Brahman, Allah, Buddha, or the Godhead.

We had shielded ourselves from our Ultimate Reality in order to protect the false ego identity. But once the screen is broken through, then we can live in a state of serenity, even of bliss. Really, it comes down to a question of how much Shakti are you willing to receive.

You would think that everybody would say “yes, yes, I want it all,” but they don’t. They want very little of the bliss, because to the extent that one receives the Shakti, the ego begins to dissolve.

All of the things the ego is holding onto and is most attached to start to dissolve. They lose their meaning. Those finite concerns become irradiated by something finer, something infinite, some essence more beautiful that will enrapture your consciousness and guide it away from the game that it had become so very good at playing. The ego resists leaving that game behind, even though what it is going to is far more momentous and more wonderful.

That is the whole question. Are you willing to let go of the old landmarks and the attachments and the assumptions and the insignia of egoic power, the limited kind of power, the limited kind of knowledge, the limited kind of maneuverability one has as an ego before the vast, incomparable presence of God Consciousness?

It is that question that we go back and forth on that determines where we are in our spiritual process. In theory, it is just crossing over that portal and realizing that this entirety of Shakti, this ultimate energy, this divine luminous power, is what you are and who you have been all along. You are God Consciousness, nothing else, nothing less.

In the Kashmiri Shaivite tradition, they say that Shiva put on a bunch of kanchukas, or cloaks, one after another, and disguised Himself, to the point where he became utterly unrecognizable to Himself. The spiritual process is simply taking off those cloaks, one after another.

Those cloaks are the identification with the body, with memory, with the logic of human discourse, with the limited attributes, qualities, and possessions of the ego, the limited family and cultural identifications, and the limitations of phenomenal desire. These impediments create a corresponding limitation in our ability to understand, at a higher level than duality, the true nature of Reality. They cloak our ability to realize that we are not living in time, but in eternity. They cloak the higher powers and potentialities that are latent within us.
But once we commit our lives to the achievement of the Supreme Liberation, once we say yes, this is who I am, I am a manifestation of Sat, or Shiva, or the Ultimate Reality—then the portal opens to the full bath, or baptism, of Shakti.

Along with Sat come Chit and Ananda. Chit is the higher intelligence that can now grasp subtle aspects of the Real that slip out of the ego’s grasp. Now we can know Reality in its nondual, paradoxical, ultimate essence. Ananda, the bliss of Love, also fills us. It is Ananda that breaks through the self-hatred of the ego and enables one to love one’s Self, but simultaneously to realize that the Self is Emptiness, the Ultimate Reality of the Universe, the void of the Abyss and the fullness of God.

The ego tries to play a trick on itself by saying, “I, the ego, am not worthy, am not good enough to have God Consciousness. I don’t deserve it.” This is begging the question, losing sight of the fact that this undeserving entity is fictional, it doesn’t exist. Therefore, by breathing life into a non-existent lacking entity and then saying it is unworthy—this is a game that is being played in order to maintain separateness from the God Consciousness that you really are.

There is no unworthy being within you. There are only assumptions and beliefs and phantasies that there is an unworthy being. And then one breathes life into those false assumptions and creates the illusion that you are some kind of an egoic being that isn’t worthy of God Consciousness, because of bad habits, something that you did in the past, or a sense of guilt for ideas that you had, desires, fears, etc. One can create persecuting inner voices, somatic attacks, self-sabotage at many different levels, all to justify the sacrifice of the ego’s happiness to some fictitious Other that cloaks the memory of the parents that is both idolized and demonized.

But all of those unconscious maneuvers are products of the false belief in an entity that was unreal to begin with. The ego never was real. It was only formed out of identification with projections from other unreal entities, the parental ego states. The ego, out of need for parental acceptance, doesn’t want to spoil the party by revealing to those entities that they are not real, because their mental stability could easily come unglued and the whole domino effect would result in psychosis. But now that childhood subservience is no longer called for, the dissolution of the superego figures as well as the ego’s self-images, and the whole menagerie of emotional complexes that have become attached to them, will bring about nothing less than the Supreme Liberation.

The ego maintains the false bravado that it believes in its own existence, which gives life its pathos, but it knows at another level that it doesn’t really believe in its illusory identity. The ego pretends to believe in itself only in order to keep the game going. Once the game has become stale, meaningless, and futile, then the portal to transcendence re-appears to consciousness. In the instant of letting go of the ego identity, immediately there is a sense of being held in an all-encompassing Presence, and of a sea of Silence, a vast Emptiness that is filled with the luminous Presence of Divine Light that is everywhere.

There is no longer a material world. What we think of as matter resonates with divine vibration. Forms are simply the play of divine light. We realize that Shiva, Sat, is not simply the consciousness within, but is the whole of what had been mistaken for a material world without. That also is part of the game that was being played by consciousness. All things, all beings partake of this beautiful dance of the One as the many, simultaneously, eternally.

But because the Oneness had been forgotten, the many-ness could no longer be played out harmoniously. The play became more and more conflicted, filled with enmity and envy, obscuring its essential quality, the most beautiful, selfless love.

Once the ego is dissolved, then there isn’t any basis for any of those obscurations and resistances to be maintained. One lives in the state of grace that is the Shakti of our true Being.
When we meditate, all we are really doing is opening the Shakti Gate and receiving the Shakti. That is all. You want to receive it to the point that there is a realization that what you are receiving is the Divine Light that is your very own Essence. It is God pouring God into God. What you are receiving is the very Godness that you had emptied out from the ego consciousness. It is now being refilled. This is your true Nature and always has been.

If you can allow yourself to receive this energy in an unbroken way, without cutting it off, without saying, “Okay, that’s enough,” but allowing it to come in until it fills that inner space completely, there will be no more space for ego and the illusion is dissolved, the game is over. Then one can live in that unbroken God Consciousness eternally.

So, let’s practice that now.

Namaste,
Shunyamurti