The Cloth of Joy and Freedom
Śiva moves through the Sky of Consciousness as the embodied and liberated sādhaka who wears the cloth of joy and freedom, intricately woven with the Divine Thread.
There is no greater joy for me than to talk about God — and specifically, about the perpetual possibility available to each of us to know that directly, in ourselves. The realization of our highest Self is the very purpose of this life, and it is so extraordinary that we can truly recognize and live the joy of that experience moment by moment, every day.
We are the life that emerges from pure Consciousness, from what Bhagavan Nityananda called The Sky of Consciousness. As Śiva creates life, he moves through his own Sky of Consciousness, which is within Him. From the perspective of our nondual tradition, there is only one thing in existence: there is only Consciousness and Its emergent quality of freedom. Tradition also tells us that Śiva manifests all of creation because of the desire to express the overflowing joy of His very being. Think about that for a second!
Since everything is expressed within God’s Awareness, we, too, are the living embodiment of that same overflowing, infinite joy. It is really mindboggling to understand that we can be in contact with that miracle — with that extraordinary gift of grace that gives us the possibility of knowing the pure joy that expresses Itself as us. What this mean to each of us is that we have to respond to that gift.
We Must Allow Freedom to Reveal Itself in Us
You must ask yourself: Am I allowing that freedom to reveal itself in me? Except for rare individuals, most of us don’t know the true treasure that’s within us unless we consciously look for it. And unfortunately, the nature of our lives is that we are too caught up in the mundane details and tensions of our day, in the apparent duality of life, to spend the necessary time doing our sādhana.
We’re so busy looking for joy in our activities or in our relationships that we don’t find it in ourselves. We don’t recognize that it is ever-present, always there within us. Therefore, as sādhakas, we must use the practices we have been given to turn our awareness inside. The purpose of our sādhana is to free ourselves, not by escaping from the individual life we’ve been given, but by gaining the freedom of consciousness available to us in our life at every moment.
Why is freedom so elusive? Because, due to the perception of duality within our awareness, we are always looking for one thing or another. And unfortunately, that generally means we’re looking for something other, which further solidifies the perception of separation of “twoness” instead of unity. This is never a rejection of that which appears to be outside of us, but it is a discovery that everything in life is an expression of our own innate pure consciousness, which is not separate from God’s Consciousness. In truth, there is nothing outside us: there is no other.
Svātantrya: The Power of God
We seek to directly experience that we are the living expression of God’s effulgence, an embodied and liberated sādhaka who wears the cloth of joy and freedom, intricately woven with the Divine Thread. That cloth of freedom is woven with the power of Consciousness, with Śakti, energy. This is svātantrya, the autonomous power of Consciousness which then express itself as the matrix of all creation, as Kauliki Śakti. That power is the Divine Thread that is weaving the fabric of existence, and is also within us, as the deepest core of our psychic system. It is the subtlest, yet most powerful of the four dimensions of the central channel — a path of pure illuminating Consciousness. The same light that manifests the entire cosmos is within each of us.
This power birthed us from within Its own heart, and It would not have done that for any other purpose except to express freedom. But inherent in that freedom is also choice. We can choose to ignore the opportunity to know the Divine within us, or we can choose to discover and live in the highest awareness. It’s hard to imagine making the lesser choice, and yet, unfortunately, we do that every day by seeking happiness in the conditions of our lives, trying to mold life into a shape that we think will fulfill us. We cannot find joy when we’re looking for it, but we can uncover what is inherent within us — a joy that is never created nor diminished by any form or any condition.
Never forget that the real treasure is already inside you. God gave you this life for the purpose of discovering the effulgence of His joy. Remember what an extraordinary gift it is to be alive!