Constant Conversation

Take a seat in the café of life!

The meaning of life

When people wonder about the meaning of life, they generally want to discover what makes their lives important. A desire for permanency is mixed up with the question of life’s meaning.

Many people want to leave a mark on life or live in a way that will be remembered. They feel that contentment lies in looking back at enduring accomplishments. They approach life as a mission that will end with some kind of solution to the “problem” of death and our insignificance.

From the perspective of my spiritual traditions, life has no meaning in the conventional sense. Instead, life is expressive, communicative, and responsive.

Doing spiritual practice, we ultimately discover that life is more like a café. We learn to relax and enjoy the meandering, improvisational conversation. We want to embody compassion and intelligence and devotion, but it doesn’t add up to anything other than enjoying the creative play of life fully expressing itself.

Constant conversation

Expressions are always communications. We can only communicate when there is some sense of an other to whom we speak.

Self-reflection is ground zero for the experience of an other. In a simple way, the “other” is produced when we reflect on ourselves. We internally divide ourselves and have a conversation with ourselves about ourselves. Or maybe we actually talk to ourselves outloud!

In Trika Shaivism, this power of self-reflection is called vimarsha, the primordial power of Shakti to project infinite appearings of others: other beings, circumstances, and worlds.

The power of this alive-aware reality to appear in the form of different beings allows for the experience of communication. Duality is an infinite, improvisational expressive theater of conversation.

But this conversation is by no means limited to sentient beings. The entire world is participating.

The flowers are expressing themselves to the nose. The patterns of bird flight to the wind. The circumstances of your life are all communications.

The conversation is also not just about thoughts and words. It includes the full range of sensations and emotions including compassion, tenderness, mercy, and devotion.

As we open the gates of our senses, we embody more of this world conversation, and its omnipresence and subtlety become more apparent to us.

Call and response

Communication plays in an infinite field of reception and response. Call and response is a more accurate description than “cause and effect” of what goes on here.

The call and response play of this alive-aware reality is improvisational, playful, and intelligent.

As we go along in our sadhana, we become more sensitive to the response of the world to our communications. We discover that we are living in a self-aware field of communication.

One day, a visiting doctor came to say goodbye to Anandamayi Ma. His train for Bombay was departing that afternoon.

A devotee stood combing Mataji’s long hair. Mataiji suggested that the doctor take a different train, but the man was in a hurry and could see no logic in this.

Without looking at him, Ma plucked a few strands of hair from the comb. She wound them three times around the middle joint of her index finger with great precision. Then she spoke very slowly:

“Everything I say. . . and everything I do. . . has meaning.”

When Anandamayi Ma declares that everything she says and does has meaning, She is speaking directly on behalf of reality. She is letting the young doctor know that his narrow, ordinary reasoning is blocking his understanding of his real situation.

Ma was saying that her utterances were not to be discounted. The import may not be immediately clear to ordinary mind, but she could see far into space and time.

In Anandamayi’s world, all of life is a meaningful communication. In the doctor’s world, only “logical” statements or a limited range of other expressions are “meaningful.” Perhaps he might also notice “coincidences.”

The doctor is a barely literate person, while Mataji speaks, reads and writes all of the world’s primary languages.

Ritual listening

If you happen to meet any highly realized person, it is often the case that they appear to be listening to and receiving signals from near and far. Such a person’s senses extend through time and space. When we relax, we too can listen and join the multi–dimensional flow of constant conversation.

A common way that we begin to listen more consciously to the field of reality’s communication is through ritual. Once we learn the formal languages of ritual, we can begin to notice the powerful responses that ritual evokes. This can be quite shocking for Westerners who are used to performing rituals with a bit, or a lot, of skepticism.

Whether or not you enjoy ritual, if you practice consistently, you will begin to speak the language of the world more precisely. You will develop precision in your activities as you get more in tune with the tune of life.

Here is a simple home ritual to get you started.

Simple daily ancestor ritual

with infinite love,
Shambhavi