The Fat of Mother's Love

It has been in the past, it is today, probably it will be in the future, always a temptation for someone who is following the path of tantra, the path of personal transformation by technique to fall into a pattern of differentiating more strongly between themselves as individuals and the cosmos, the universe, providence, whatever you want to call it, as the environment in which we as individuals find ourselves, the environment from which we have come, in which we live and into which we will return again, and it is natural that this should be the case because we are focusing on self-transformation, so right there there is a focus on this little self that is created by our individual shakti which is called ahankara, the thing that creates ineness in a person, and you have to have a strong sense of self if you are going to be able to first strategize and then carry through on your strategy for proceeding ahead with whatever kind of procedure, whatever kind of weaving you are going to do to try to transform yourself and your relationship to the world, so there is always going to be a potential temptation for you to make that distinction, that differentiation between you and the cosmos a little more calcified, a little more stratified, a little harder and edgier than it should be. This is particularly the case in the west because in the west we have a different concept of what a healthy personality is than in the east. In the east, a healthy personality, and this is slowly changing, but it is still fundamentally the case and by the east I mean not only India, it is also the case so far as I can tell and so far has been reported to me in China and Japan, Korea, etc., Vietnam, that if you become too differentiated from your family and your clan and your society, that is one of the chief symptoms of a disturbed or diseased personality. You are always expected to remember that you are the child of so and so and the parent of so and so and the sibling of so and so and you always have to acknowledge that to some degree they are participating in your self definition. In the west, it is much more the case that people believe that unless you are individuated away from your siblings and your parents and your children and so on, that you are not healthy, that you have to actively separate yourself from all of these people who were members of your family, either blood family or your associated family, the family, the people who as Barbara Kingsolver dissolved it, the people you won't let go of for anything.

So the people who are part of your life in an ongoing way, these are family members. So here in the west, and among people who are brought up in a western way wherever they happen to live, there's always a tendency to wall yourself off from everyone else and of course the difficulty in that happening is that if you were too walled off, then actually interacting in a meaningful, sincere and real way with other human beings can sometimes become rather problematical. So it's useful when you're trying to work with a tontitic procedure to keep reminding yourself that your ultimate goal is to dissolve your personality completely. And for that purpose, you should be able to dissolve as much as you can and then re-coagulate and let there be a boundary but not let it be impervious to what needs to come in and what needs to go out. This is quite possibly one of the reasons why there may be a greater prevalence of certain kinds of mental disturbances in the west if people are not allowed to let out some of the irrational or very disturbed things that are part of them if they're trying to hold on to them all the time.

Now it's quite possible that your own personal, you as an individual, your own personal family is not one that you can personally relate to that well. The good news is that providence or the universe or the cosmos or the divine maternal principle, the divine mother, is always available for you to relate to. And the divine mother, the divine reality, whatever you want to call it, is always interested to relating to you in a very positive and maternal way if that's how you choose to relate to her. If you think of the universe as a very dangerous and difficult place, it's quite possible that you will attract danger and difficulty to yourself. If you think of the universe as a place that is fundamentally benevolent, it's provided you with life, it's providing you with food, it's providing you with air, you're able to experience the reality of being alive because the universe is delivering all these things to you if you appreciate that.

And if you can think of the universe as a maternal force, then it's very likely that that will be more of the experience that you will have. Motherly love was something that my mentor focused on substantially when he was trying to describe the kind of relationship that it's good to have with the cosmos, especially when you're performing tantric practices. He himself had performed quite a number of tantric practices, had achieved success with many of them, and he iterated and reiterated how important it was to have the right attitude towards the universe so that you wouldn't simply accumulate a lot of energy and have it inside either making you crazy by not knowing what to deal with it or having you vomit it out in some very unattractive and potentially quite dangerous or destructive way. And his opinion was it was always wise to treat the universe as a mother, because matrutva, or a motherly love, is that kind of love that we have in human experience that is not expecting any reward whatsoever. The universe doesn't expect any reward from you other than that you live as best you can in the best way that you can, you're grateful for the gift of life, and you try to do what you can to benefit other living beings, sentient beings of all kind, including beings that we might not think of necessarily as being sentient, including rocks and mountains and oceans and all sorts of things like that.

So one of the things that is most noteworthy about the quality of motherly love is that it is very, very, very snigdha. I have to use the Sanskrit word because if I use the word oily, it sounds like someone who's a snake oil salesman, but this is not snake oil. This is kind of like the sort of medicated oil that you would apply to your body. One of the words for oil or for fat in general in Sanskrit is snaeha. In fact, just using the word snaeha or a snigdha, which is an adjective, it just sounds kind of smooth, snaeha, and they say that that's the chief quality of maternal and by extension other family related love, that it's that kind of affection that is calming to the organism that makes, that allows you to feel that you can relax into it.

It's not frothy and bubbly and romantic and dramatic and passion filled and so on. It's much more a matter of having emotion that has a firm foundation, is calm, is relaxed, and is something that you can rely upon. It's something that is a guarantee to you. It's interesting that in Sanskrit, this very word snaeha can mean both literal fat and it means this kind of very nourishing love. It's interesting because what this suggests in Ayurveda is that when you have a good quality of fat in your body, that your body will be able to feel this kind of love within itself in a very kind of molecular way at the level of each and every cell.

When you feel that kind of nourishing maternal love, when you feel like that your entire body is having this kind of maternal love delivered to it, then you yourself will feel very possibly inspired to extend that out to that very providence who is providing it to you. When you don't feel that in your tissues, when that tissue of fat is not being properly nourished, then you're going to feel like a child who is not being properly loved and taken care of by its mother and you're going to crave it. You may go out and cause trouble for yourself and others by craving it, by getting into emotional entanglements with people, not in a no expectation of reward mode, but rather expecting that you're going to be able to take this fat from someone else. Take this quality of love from someone else and that unfortunately is not likely to be satisfactory for you or for this person that you're trying to feed off of. Otherwise you may go in the direction of eating fat because it is the case that when you consume fat temporarily your body does feel like it does when it is obtaining that kind of nourishing maternal love.

So it's not surprising that people start to eat fatty snacks when they're feeling a lack of affection from the outside world. And then that makes the fat in their own bodies less healthy and then internally, even though they may have lots of fat, they will still feel like they don't have enough because the quality of the fat is not good and the chemistry of the body is saying give me some good fat for pity's sake, but you continue to provide it with fat that is not good. So rather than try to obtain either from another human being or from your food source this kind of maternal affection that is available to you at all times from Providence, from the universe as a whole, it's much better to move in the direction of assisting the universe to provide you that nourishment in the form of affection that you require. Now in order to do that you have to be willing to behave as a child towards the universe. If you start to think that you're a very important person and very powerful and you're an expert and you're in charge of everything, then the big cosmic mother will say great, go ahead, move out, do whatever you want to, I'm going to take care of your siblings because they are requesting me to take care of them.

And then after a while maybe you will realize that in fact this was not the most clever thing to do because you're not smart enough to have the perspective that the universal mother does on the universe because after all her perspective is always going to be superior to your perspective. It can't be any other way because you are a limited human being. It's sometimes easy to get carried away especially when you're accumulating shakti. Remember however, where did that shakti come from? It's not your shakti, temporarily it is with you but it is not permanent.

Shakti is always moving around and that shakti has always come from the big mama who has all of the shakti, is lending it to you for right now, after a while it's going to come back because you're not permanent and she's going to lend it to somebody else and she's trying to find the best way to lend it out and to those people who are going to be able to dispense it to others and to do her work for her. So when you are doing, this is true of any kind of, whenever you get any kind of shakti as it starts to increase, it's going to be very tempting especially if your personality is rather confined and not open to other individuals, it's going to be very tempting to start to think of yourself as someone who is very important and very essential to the universe and the more that that happens, the more of a demon you become, the more like a Ravana you become instead of a Rama or Sita or Hanuman. So rather than move in that direction, start off by surrendering to the universal mother and when you get an appropriate alignment with her, that will be a good start to everything else that you are doing, it can allow you to make positive movement in these practices that you have elected to commit yourself to without the concern that they might drag you in a direction that you don't necessarily want to go.