From the accomplished yogi’s POV, all types of love have the same essential nature: great bliss, same as all beings and phenomena. I figured this out when I went to express feelings for my spiritual friend from whom I’ve been separated the majority of time since we met. “Perhaps we’ve become a source of great bliss for each other—having this is necessary—and we can experience that bliss merely by thinking of each other. But I feel we also need, at times, to be physically in the same space.” Since before, and at the time of this writing, the focus of my Buddhist practice has been essentially realizing the co-emergent wisdom of supreme nonduality (the natural state beyond the base luminosity of mind, the Great Bliss of Wisdom indicated above) then the possibilities of it’s various ‘delivery systems’ is naturally of great interest to me.
Starting from the ‘outermost’ first, there are the 24 peeta power places of yogini adepts either born there, or arisen out of a compassionate need, displaying their coy ways and secret signs, so as to share their great bliss with the vow and knowledge holding faithful.
Next, there’s the Vajrayana practice with the Guru as the disciples’ personal Buddha bestowing the means of becoming fully Enlightened. With advanced and special means, the two stages of imaginative processes—creation and completion—activated by empowerment and Abhisheka, opening the psycho-physical means—pathways, chakras and such—to engender for those of great diligence and faith, the highest consecration and sarva yoga, the coemergent conate wisdom of Great Bliss.
When romantic love is brought into all of this, it’s sometimes linked to Guru Yoga, with the ‘beloved’ transcendently functioning as a guru. Regarding two spiritual friends, who are both on the path to realize their great bliss, and having a great desire to stay both physically and imaginatively linked, it only becomes like a guru discipleship if one party’s ‘love’ is unrequited. Then, as Annie Tenzin Palmo has suggested, one can practice generosity and detachment by wishing the beloved not to be at one’s disposal, but at their own, doing whatever it is that’s best for them and not oneself. The unrequited lover and the beloved as teacher or ‘guru’ was of course the subject of the prolific Renaissance poet Petrarch’s sonnets.
The best delivery system of Great Bliss of Wisdom is the possession of great faith—as it, like everything else, is ultimately causeless. The outermost, direct inspiration for me (in this life so far) has been my pilgrimage to Somnath Temple, the number one Jyotrilingam temple, Shiva Mandir, that backs onto the Arabian Sea, in Gujarat. While ‘Lord of the Soma’ or ‘Moon’ is the more conventional translation of Somnath, my personal rendering is ‘Accomplished of Great Bliss.’
“It is unclear when the first version of the Somnath temple was built, with estimates varying between the early centuries of the 1st millennium and about the 9th century CE. The temple is not mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism; while various texts, including the Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana, mention a tirtha (pilgrimage site) at Prabhas Patan on the coastline of Saurashtra, where the temple is presently located, there is no evidence that a temple existed at the site in ancient times.” (wiki.com)
I’ve heard it’s been rebuilt around a dozen times due to invaders. Now it’s completely secured and well-looked-after with only Brahmins performing rites within the inner sanctum. The drive there from Ahmedabad is brutal, hired drivers preferring to take the dismal interstate through Rajkot, with the only highlight being the mountainous Junagadh, with its temple at the top of ten thousand steps. But this is a bit of a detour to Somnath, as you go down down into the forested area of Gujarat’s blunted peninsula-like formation.
Somewhere around Rajkot—with not much seen from National Highway 47 but an overcrowded dilapidation—I was thinking we should’ve taken a coastal route down, but one doesn’t exist, as National Highway 51 doesn’t skirt the coast. It’s not like California, with its Coastal Highways 1 and 101. Had we stopped in Rajkot, here’s what’s there: “Rajkot is a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. In central Jubilee Garden are the Lang Library, with Gujarati literature, and the Watson Museum, with paintings and artifacts documenting British colonial rule. Kaba Gandhi No Delo, the house where Mahatma Gandhi spent part of his childhood, displays photos of the Indian leader and his belongings. The Rotary Dolls Museum exhibits dolls from around the world.” (wiki.org)
Yes, well. Perhaps I’m glad we didn’t stop, as Somnath Shiva Mandir and its many surrounding temples (the Gop Temple dating back to 6th or 5th BC) provide a heady Hindu experience, dedicated to gods and goddesses Vishnu, Lakshmi, Rama, Sita, Parvati, Krishna, Radha, Sarswati, Ganesh, and the rest, in fervent local iterations. But it’s certainly more than that, with its underground shrines where vows are evinced from pilgrims bent over by a four feet high ceiling. It’s a collective evocation of bliss, a drive to take the soma nectar of immorality and ecstasy.
The initial impetus to visit Somnath was Yogeshvara’s (Lord Virupa of both Gorkanath’s Nath Yogi movement and Vajrayana Lamdre fame) wrathful visit there, a thousand years ago, when he castigated the Hindus for making animal sacrifices. He split their God’s image and had them build one to himself. I thought perhaps it was in the old temple complex, very near the new one mentioned above, which is also still active. So looking around, I found a very small lingam shrine at the rear, where a claque of faithful were heard to be chanting something possibly Buddhist, in Gujarati-Sanskrit or Prakrit—an argot perhaps only intelligible to an outsider with the aide of a linguistic expert. I took this to possibly be the place where once a shrine to Virupa had possibly been. But as there was no signs of it today, I recorded the chanting and moved on.
Once I was all through, having set eyes on the gorgeous lingam of Jyotrilingam #1, all flower strewn and fabric bedecked exclusively by Brahmin priests, and then touring perhaps twenty more temples large and small, my khaki shirt was soaked-through and my lower limbs ached. Retiring to my room, after showering, I laid alone in an intense solitude. The essential purpose of such an offbeat and esoteric touring turned out to be the coemergence of an outermost ritualistic experience with an innermost elemental and subtle energies one.
Bluntly put, I was besotted with bliss in an episode of timelessness and total non-conceptuality. I became semi-incontinent, tasting all as the purported soma of this place I’d planned to go to for some time. There, in that appropriately named ‘Elysian’ hotel, it was as if I’d drank from the River Lethe and forgotten all things conventionally real. Was this then the Great Bliss of the coemergent? Akin to the Fifth Consecration and Ati Yoga of the highest tantric Buddhist practices? At the time, I didn’t question such things or have any thoughts whatsoever. I was sanguine and immobile as Saraha’s task-less camel. When I then wanted to experience eating in such ecstasy, I took leftover food in unwashed hands and ate ravishingly, like a pig with dancing hind quarters. The outer limits of my bodily form were filled with ‘moon’ in a liberating, electric blue light. Not surprisingly, my Vajrayana practice held, even in this Shaivist enclave, as deity, mantra, and dharmakaya became one, all and everything.
While in that peerless state of bliss, only one thought occurred that I can remember, and that was that I knew I didn’t have to leave that space of ecstasy, nor the physical room itself, for three or four hours, and that was the greatest gift from all the gods I’d just paid lavash homage to at Somnath.
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