God is Transgender: Both Shiva and Shakti
Summary: God’s secret, that the ego cannot grasp, is that the unmanifest potency (the Supreme Lord) emanates the manifest world—the form of the Goddess—within unmanifest Mind. The dream is not other than the mind of the dreamer. The dream is a dance of duality in all its possible expressions. The phenomenal plane is also the noumenal: samsara is nirvana. One must not take priority over the other, since they are the same.
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One of the confusions of the postmodern period is the transgender confusion—or I should say the gender confusion. Transgenderism maybe is one way to solve that confusion. I think that one of the great issues that have never been fully confronted in the—let’s call it the Hindu tradition—is the transgender identity of God. Shiva is Shakti (when we talk about the Ardhanarishvara, it’s not exactly true that they split the body in half, it’s totality). But the human mind cannot grasp that your totality could be both Shiva and Shakti. Therefore, it has to be conceptualized that Shakti emanates from Shiva—Shiva being the unmanifest, absolute, inconceivable wholeness, and Shakti becoming that which is the expression in manifest form of that ultimate, inconceivable, paradoxical mind of Shiva.
So, within the frame of reference of duality then, genders are again separated because, according to the human mind, there are differences. Humans in the ego see only differences, in fact. But what you see when you’re looking through the eyes of Shakti, the Goddess, is the nonduality within duality, the sameness within difference. If you can’t see the sameness within difference, you’re never going to be able to be in rapport with another being, because otherwise they’re too different from you. You can’t understand them. Their use of the same signifiers you use have a different signified.
So we have to understand the manifest world from the consciousness that recognizes that the logic of duality dominates the apparent flow of events that unfold in time and space, and we also have to see in the nonduality that nothing is happening but a single thought. God’s mind is being expressed in manifest logical form, which requires a drama of untold thousands of years because the mind of God is pretty large; it requires huge populations of very many different life forms to express all the potentialities of God’s way of enjoyment. You can’t imagine how enjoyable a dung beetle’s life is—you’ve never lived until you’ve gone through that one, and Buddha was famous for pointing that out. The creatures of this world have types of enjoyment that you can’t imagine. The hawks, the lions, the whales—you can’t really conceive of their lives. But they’re amazing, they’re extraordinary, and they have the intelligence of Shiva. So that same intelligence is in the floor materials that we think we are creating—that’s all made of Shiva. It’s all made of light and the intelligence of Shiva. Therefore, extraordinary things can happen with “inanimate” objects. Carl Jung was famous for saying that when he went back to his abode in the country, after a while the pots and pans would start banging by themselves. They were angry at him for being gone so long. I believe that kind of event. There are many things that our so-called objects of use—many games—that they play on us. So it’s not simply a trick of our mind, but a trick of the mind; and the mind is always playing tricks. What else is a mind interested in but tricks? (Trick or treat, of course, but the trick is the treat if you get it.)
And that’s the difference between bad karma and good karma: do you get it? Otherwise, if you don’t get it, it’s all bad karma. If you do get it, it’s all good. You see? But ultimately, in Shiva’s inconceivable sense of humor, good and evil are not different. And that’s what no one can grasp or even wants to grasp. Because the way it will be grasped in the imaginary, by the ego, is a kind of nihilistic rejection of goodness: “If good and evil are the same, I can kill people. I can do whatever I want.” That’s not the point of it. The point is to recognize that everything that does happen in the world has a perfect karmic trajectory, so that the outcome—if you understand the logic of Shiva that’s behind it—leads always, in the ninth inning with two out and bases loaded, to Shiva’s coming to bat and hitting an Om run. But until you’re in that inning and you’re at that point, will you keep the faith that you can win a game that you’re sure has already been lost?
This is one of the great beauties of Shiva’s Theodrama: it has to reach that point where it seems that the dark forces will win. That’s why the urgency of total faith in a time of despair and dread becomes ever more urgent as a beacon of salvation and redemption and peace and acceptance for this entire holographic cinematic experience that is about to return to the Light that has been projecting it, and again become one with the inconceivable Shiva. If one doesn’t recognize that that’s the ultimate blessing, then it will seem like a horrifying destruction and a meaningless end to a ridiculous, absurd universe. But if you grasp the beauty of what is subtly being prepared by the consciousnesses in the duality, in their learning at the very end of the complete revelation of truth, if you are open to it, then you recognize that all of it was worthwhile. All of it was perfect in every moment in which you felt like you had been totally betrayed or totally abandoned or had totally, horrifically fallen into an abyss or been captured by demons—whatever might be in your particular subplot line of the Theodrama—it all ends in the glory of the Divine Light, the Supreme Liberation.
So it’s important that you be in that state if you want to begin practice—that you have that orientation because, without that, you won’t have faith. And without faith, you will not be able to overcome the obstacles. Faith will eventually be replaced by knowledge, and then faith can be jettisoned because you don’t need to believe in or yearn for something once you realize you are that. But until you have crossed the barrier from duality to nonduality, faith and surrender are both required.
So let’s call this little module or map “The Seven Prerequisites to Successful Practice” (the practice of self-mastery, but we know that). The first step is Keep a clean mind. Let’s just leave it at that. But the fine print under what a clean mind is exactly is something that you need to understand. If you’re in a certain level of duality within the ego mind, you will need to understand psychic hygiene differently than if you’ve already reached soul-consciousness and are present to the paradoxical mind of Shiva. If you’re still in duality and you believe in duality, then the clean mind will be one that has renounced worldly desires at least because of the knowledge that desire is based on fear. If there were no fear and no sense of lack, then desire would not grab you as a drive the way that it tends to for the ego.
And you know that the fate of desire is projection and then attachment to those projections, and then mimetic rivalry, envy, hatred, loss, and all of the consequences of the logical downfall of the desirous ego mind that eventually leads to a crackup where the Lower Death Drive takes over, right? That’s not news to you. So that’s the reason for, and what a clean mind would be, at that level. And that would include, then, at a slightly higher level, being non-judgmental about others—not only until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins, but it will take much more than that to understand what’s really motivating the karmic unfoldment of anyone.
So there must be the humility of accepting the unknown and the unknowable reason for the appearance of a phenomenon in one’s dream field—unless one enters into the consciousness of Shiva, and then the waking dream can be interpreted accurately, as can the sleeping dreams as well. But until you know the truth that transcends all the apparent differences that constitute the logic of worlds, you will not be able to pierce the veil of the illusion. So humility is called for. Once you are at a higher level, at a soul level, you will start to be able to see consistently the sameness within the differences. You will see the light shining through every being, and you will see that every being is ultimately animated by Shiva, who is the Self of every being. Then that will free you from the psychological detritus of all the judgments, attitudes, preferences, desires, revulsions, all of that. And the way of perceiving the world will not be different from the perception of the Light of God, because nirvana and samsara are not different.
But as in a movie, where there’s a projector that sends light through a film, a cellulose or celluloid film, and then that light, now configured by various pixelated colors, appears on the screen. It’s one light but those who pay money to sit and watch it aren’t looking at the one light. They’re picking out different characters on the screen, and they’ll pick out one to identify with, another one to be the villain, and another one to be the hero’s love interest or object of desire, depending on the level of movie script that it is or whatever. But you have all of these aspects that you’ll be focusing on and an intricate plot in which the evil ones want to take over the world, and the hero has to kill all kinds of evil minions and then get captured and face the chief of the evil ones, seemingly hopeless and about to be terminated, and then turn the tables on him and be victorious. Right? Isn’t that the basic plot of James Bond and so many others of that type? And people very much enjoy paying money to see this kind of thing.
Well, we are obviously living through a similar kind of movie, so it’s clear why they exist. Shiva’s an auteur, you know, and loves to be in the audience, as well as being an actor and being the director and the scriptwriter. Shiva is a ham—that’s why the main mantra is “Shivo ham.” You know, Shiva loves to perform; and so, therefore, He loves to dress up as Shakti. OK? You can’t even call Him a transvestite anymore—I don’t think people wear vests no matter what their gender is—but Shiva loves to be out there in ways that are so daring and bold and absurd and eccentric and different—that’s the key—and special that they become celebrities or they become some object of conversation because—“You did that?” Whatever it was, whether good or evil in conventional terms or just climbing the sheer face of a mountain or jumping out of an airplane without a parachute—whatever is the current fad that you have to do to be considered a member of the club—you have to have your wingsuit go through a certain number of canyons, you know?)
In any case, the world provides these kinds of extreme experiences, and so our psychic cleanness must refer to the ability to hold extreme opposites in the mind in harmony—absolutely impossible opposites that are totally contradictory, including “The true is the false.” Now, can anyone really hold that in their mind except Shiva? But, the whole world being false, no matter what you think is true, it’s false because it’s fictional, right? And yet it’s Shiva, and Shiva is real and, therefore, it’s true. And it’s good, and it’s perfect, and it’s beautiful—“But it’s the ugliest thing I ever saw”—but it’s beautiful, you see? Can you hold that paradox of ugliness and beauty as not different? It takes a very rare level of consciousness (or maybe unconsciousness) to be able to tolerate those extremes.
But that’s the mind and the heart of Shiva.