Jai Ma! Great article by Kamalakantaji! We live in a time and place with much sand. I appreciate the sentiment of non-judgment when it comes to observing the many flavors of the human landscape in relation to spiritual knowledge, experience, and lack there-of. I know, for me, it can be frustrating to see the sacred tradition, religion, and holy way that I am a part of, be often misrepresented, watered down, or misunderstood in the West; so aiming for non-judgment is always a good reminder for me.

A resonant teaching that I recently heard from a Zen Buddhist monk that I like says, "Rather than fight the darkness, seek the light with absolute determination" He tells an old story of a fox who has been getting into the farmer's chicken coop and killing the chickens. In response, the farmer molds a "guard" out of tar and places it at the entry of the coop. The fox approaches the tar figure and says, "Hey! What are you looking at? You'd better stop looking at me or I'll punch you!" And of course, the tar figure doesn't move. The fox swung at it and got his paw stuck in the tar. The fox says, "Hey! You'd better let go of my leg or I'll kick you!" The tar figure remains motionless, and the fox kicks with all his might, getting his foot also stuck in the tar. And on and on it goes, until the fox is completely entangled in the sticky tar. Meanwhile, had the fox sought his goal with absolute determination, and walked right around the sticky "guard", he would have achieved what he set out to do.

While this story isn't a perfect example, as I don't mean to equate "the light", or "sugar" with killing a chicken, the teaching applies, and takes the metaphor of the rishi in the story a step further I feel, like this... Like the wise ant, seek the sugar with unwavering determination, and do not get caught up in tasting, or wrestling with the sand on your way. I think if we follow our instinct to our goal with absolute focus, the sand falls away, and the sugar reveals itself, with unquestionable clarity.

This is my personal interpretation, relevant to my own experience, and I think perhaps it applies to the modern context that we find ourselves collectively in.

Thank you for the food for thought, and the support that the Wise Ant teaching is for all seekers!

🐜🐣🐾🌺

Yes! A great blog post from Kamalakantaji!

I have been seeking “sugar” most of my life, it seems. Had my fair share of sand, sugar-coated sand, and, by Ma’s Grace, some authentic, organic sugar, as well.

I can appreciate that I’ve been using my own, very similar checklist of sorts, as I’ve been on this spiritual journey; and as cultivating a direct relationship with God has been the focus throughout, I’ve tuned my ear to Her voice “in my gut”, as it were. Having elders on the path has been paramount, of course, to be a grounding voice of experience when the waters of emotionalism begin to rise. The scriptures, accountability of lineage, and now, the voice of my own Guruji, are crucial instruments as I attempt to sail this ship in the right direction. The pole stars of the saints are important guiding lights, especially when things get dark. But, all things considered, its in the opening of the sails of my heart, through authentic prayer and relationship, that the wind of God’s Grace can blow me where I need to be. And I've learned to trust is in Her winds.

A final contemplation:

It’s also in trying to “be sugar” myself, as in, to be an authentic sadhak, rooted in lineage, true to the scriptures, and corrected by a community of sadhus, that I learn what “real sugar” tastes like. And how sweet the real deal is! Beyond words, actually. :)

Jai Mā! I'm struck by the timelines of reading this article. I was recently engaged in some rather fierce discussion regarding cultural appropriation and the commercialism of yoga and kirtan. In my experience, it has, at times, seemed as though the sand were swallowing all the sugar... and me right along with it! Appropriation, colonization, and racism are three stripes on the same flag. While I appreciate the notion to let the sand be sand; sometimes, we have to take a stand also. These seeming "micro-aggressions" become quite macro when viewed through the lens of the historical domination of India... and Her many riches, which most certainly include the wisdom and practices of Yoga. That same system of suppression and theft is at play today in what is currently called yoga in the West... it just seems more benign.

I've personally fallen prey to the mass initiation of a "guru" at a time in my life when I wasn't fully aware of what I was committing to, leaving the residual felt sense of anger and betrayal. I feel cheated to have something so precious (the experience of diksha) taken from me. This was a person with whom I'd had a "direct experience" of intuitive warning that went unheeded because I was fearful that, without a guru, I couldn't have a real relationship with Mā. I had yoga teachers telling me half truths about what all of this "stuff" meant... and therein lies some of the dangers of the sand. Fortunately, Mā always has a plan... and is patient with our folly.

The experiences with this particular "guru" that followed nearly caused me to walk away from the path of dharma altogether. I'm grateful that Mā allowed me to hear Her call above the chaos of the confusion... and She lead me here, to Kali Mandir... and to GuruJi and a community of accountability, wisdom, and tradition. It is all Her grace.

Apologies for my very late response to this question! (I get notifications for the other group, but not this one for some reason -- I will remember to check here more often). I really appreciated this article when I read it and I am glad to come back to it. The part that most struck me was "the sand is a reality and poses no threat. It’s there, in abundance, but the ant isn’t fighting it. It focuses on the sugar." I have definitely struggled with the "sand," and felt frustrated in my search for sugar and judgmental about "all these people kicking sand around everywhere." This gave me an image of the ant just diligently going about it's business, focused on what it is seeking, then just as diligently bringing back the granule of sugar to the ant colony to nourish itself and others. Would the ant even be able to find the sugar if it didn't have the sand to travel on?

I also found "look for an experience or its impression that is constant over a period of time, rather than just one passing experience" to be helpful in contextualizing my own experiences.

Thank you for sharing this wisdom!

The language is careful. Sorting is useful but separating may itself not be entirely possible. Sorting allows one to organize, imbue meaning, make sense, maintain distinct purity of substances, receive nourishment, have clarity, devote focus, experience realization, and attain liberation. True or actual separation, however, seems an illusion. So how does one sort mercury, organize ether, or rearrange the ocean? Containers? Labels? Words? A mind?

We enjoy and appreciate the four discernment criteria brilliantly outlined by Schreiner (2015): Direct Experience, Linage, Scripture, and Guru. The reading teaches us much. Some questions. When is the Gut itself and not the psychosocially influenced mind or the will of the ego in disguise? If the Gut and Guru are incongruent, what is honored? If a Scripture doesn’t resonate with the Gut or a translation feels inadequate, how does one within Linage properly and respectfully seek understanding? Does the West's culture of individualism influence its frequent disregard of Linage?

Schreiner (2015) resonantly offers, "over a hundred years later, we in America are living in a time when spirituality has an unprecedented corporate and fashion based influence. The many truth seekers I’ve met have told me that nowadays the “sand” is easier to identify, but the “sugar” seems harder to find." Without the ego threat of striving to be sugar, how can one serve sugar such that it becomes 'easier to find'? How can one embody Source’s sweetness reverently? Since the journey of struggle, to a certain degree, can be so transcendental, should sugar be easier to find? Does Ma secretly long to cut free all of Her kites? Is this all not Her Lila?

Significantly, within the language we find a call for discernment. Knowing 'this' from 'that' seems just as important as knowing 'this' is one with 'that'. For many, without knowing 'that' is that one cannot know this is 'this'. Without knowing this is 'this' one cannot offer one-pointed, wholly zoned, undivided devotion. Such seems the vehicular value of contrast and paradox. When we think about how we know what we know, rather than what we think we know or what we believe, we seem to arrive at an awareness rooted in experience. As Schreiner (2015) shares, this experience should prove itself consistently. Since consistency implies a need for time and with time comes a capacity for awareness-enabling reflection, this makes sense.

Direct experience fascinates us. We reflect on a story a friend shared yesterday about a play wherein a character tells a story about a boy who chooses to live with his right arm raised above his head. In this play the character only speaks of the boy's story, yet when people who have indeed seen the play meet the actor they remark how impressively he kept his arm raised for the show's entirety. The mind's pre-dispositioned impulse to project its internal visualizations as inseparable from reality fascinates me deeply. Within dream studies, I measure and organize how one who journals of a dream post waking later shares of this dream as waking experience, forgetting they received the information in a dream. This is not the individual attempting to be dishonest, but simply them being unaware that their memory and dreams occur within the same mind space and therefore are often prone to weaving. This mixing, or tapestry of being rather, inspires many questions for us. Relative to this topic, one equates the mind to the sugar flecked shore. How does one find reality within a dreaming world?

As addressed by Sri Ramakrishna, one, even a more knowledgeable other (of whom there sure are many), can tell me 'this is sugar', but until I taste it for myself, I will not know it to be sugar, or sand. To one, even a more knowledgeable other, given various contexts, sand can be sugar and sugar, sand. While this can often prove confusing, it further validates Schreiner's (2015) suggested approach. As Kumar Gandharva so beautifully sings in Ud Jaega Hans Akela, as shared by dear Swami Ambikanandaji, "Kabir sings the qualities of God whose boundaries cannot be found…It will fly away alone, the swan. What a site: the carnival of this world!"

Discerning the real from the dream may be especially difficult for one who tastes many things at once. This one struggles to taste anything at all. Ask them to place a flavor and that particular experience is lost to them. Such seems the effect of surplus or the bombardment of competing sensory stimuli, consequence of great distraction, and cause of eventual desensitization. We now think on the seemingly symbiotic relationship between sensitivity and selectivity. Perhaps selectivity here should not be confused with matters of exclusion or inclusion, but beyond their affairs wherein renunciation is less about "not this" and more about "only this".

For personal experiment in response to the world too often seeming with a full and muddied mouth, firstly many years ago then occasionally as seems fitting, I isolate the contents and variables of my actions and food. With regard to food, I cook only one kind of vegetable or grain at a time and season only with sea salt. When eating, I focus on the nature of the specific food. Each time it seems as if I am tasting it for the first time.

Now, we speak of nourishment. There seems a difference between separation and distance. Today, most seem comfortable within their physical and psycho-spiritual distance from the source(s) of their nourishment. This, of course, seems to lead to not only to their malnourishment, but to a collective malnourishment. For example, one will merely enjoy a bottled water or one will go to a market, purchase a slaughtered animal to consume, and throughout this process, even while draining the package of its blood in preparation, they are glad not to think of this process in reverse. This distancing applies not only to livestock, agriculture, deforestation, our global climate crisis, right-exploiting markets, a third world village being denied resources, or a lower socio-economic community being polluted, and with it, the health of our home, but also to the immediate state of our being. When said mode of thinking or not thinking pervades and people seem comforted by their discomfort, no one is left satisfied; no one feels full; no one is truly nourished. So how does one get closer to the source of their nutrition? When they get close enough does the shore overflow with sugar?

When one travels this world in search of sugar, be it a shore or a desert, one may mistake all sands for that which is not sugar, but without some sand what would the sugar of this world point to in referential lesson? And what about salt--that which at first seems to be sand but becomes like sugar. Salt may not taste as pleasing as sugar, but it seems to hold immeasurable value as lesson and purifies the palate. If the shore was sugar alone would it not dissolve away? Would the ant drown? Also, is the sugar all the sweeter for its rarity? I reflect on how sugar tastes more intensely sweet after not having tasted it for many, many days. Is the desire to find sugar increased result of the sugar's rarity? If one knew sugar to be everywhere at all times would this one lose longing and abandon search? Would this one simply be among sugar? Does the nature of the world at this time influence the perception of prevalent sands? Is the sugar harder to find because one still searches for it in its crystalized form (such is perhaps the learned drive when one's reality is increasingly objectified)? Post-absorption, has the sugar fused into the ant's blood or into the devotees' heart? Could the sugar sometimes be raw energy? Is it not still sugar? In what ways does one taste it now? When the sugar takes form it seems to have many faces, but when it returns to the source of its form, it seems to have only one. This cycle of transformation never seems to disrupt the nature of sugar; it remains sweet.

"The sand is a reality and poses no threat. It’s there, in abundance, but the ant isn’t fighting it. It focuses on the sugar" (Schreiner, 2015). These words are powerfully active in their seeming passivity. In time, result of this focus, perhaps even more sugar will reveal itself. Like the ant's ommatidium which fragments all things into single points in space so that the whole eye can see a single image, we search.