S3E2 Preparation & Purification

This episode focuses on the period of preparation and purification that must precede the generation of the divine body and the emergence of its powers of transformation. We look closely at how preparation and purification are themselves patterned on the Vedic sacrifice, and specifically how the metaphors used to describe the process are those of fertility and gestation.

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Episode Transcript

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Welcome everyone. Let's give a brief summary of what the last episode was about, so that everybody can be up to speed. We talked a lot about tantra forming the ideological context for Siddha practice, or Siddha oriented practices. Remember that Siddha practices is composed of three, this tantric element, this Hatha Yoga element, in this alchemical element, and and there's so much commonality between them that we feel like you kind of speak of one, you also speak of another. The symbolic imagery of this ideological universe that's tantric David Gordon White is called erotica mystical. And so there's a sexual, mystical flavor to what is going on here and and you could kind of begin to understand that by understanding that for the Tantrics, the the absolute is can be seen as a rhythm between emergence and resorption, or what they would say, emission and resorption, or sometimes the reflection of the generation of light and the reflection back of that light, there's this rhythm going on, but they focus not only on that, but that. That rhythm is a is, is an energy creation event, not only an energy use event. It doesn't only require energy to for it to happen, but it also produces subtle essence. And you can see the erotic part being obviously that this is a rhythm, and it's a certain motion, but it's a motion that involves sexual fluids or sexual essences, so the cosmos is engaged in this rhythm and producing essence. And the earth is, and the human is, and the gods are, and so on and so forth. So it's very important to see this context, because the sexual essence of the human is the homolog of the divine essence, which, for the alchemist, for instance, are the metals in the earth. So the Siddhas believe they can intervene in this rhythm and begin to accelerate and optimize the production of these subtle essences, and that if they're successful in that, then they get liberation from ignorance, but also power. The last thing I think is very unique is that now the there's a possibility, if this intervention is successful, that the the personality or the personal uniqueness of the practitioner might be transmuted into something eternal. Might not only be something that comes and goes with circumstance, but could actually last. I think that's a different idea of liberation when compared to something like the Upanishad, where the Atman is, quote, absorbed like salt into water, into the absolute. I think that's worth noting. In this episode, we're going to begin talking about the specifics of the intervention. What do they conceive of that meaning? What do they believe needs to happen in relation to this essence that is produced? So let's say this if, if the rhythm is between manifestation and non manifestation, we have to think big. If the rhythm is between the production of light and the reflection of light the the yogis or the cities focus on the production phase. They want to limit what they would call externalization, and that means a certain set of things that we're going to be getting into over the course of a couple of episodes. But they don't just want to stop the rhythm. They want to mess with the phase of it that externalizes, because it is said that in that phase, more essence can be lost than is produced. Essence can be wasted. And so the cities really want to, want to intervene in this externalizing phase, which they're going to equate with ignorance, in some sense, and things like that. There are three stages involved in this intervening in the rhythm of great nature, purification. In immobilization and reversal. Sometimes it's called ulata sadhana, and that that means reversal to to go back. Sometimes it's called kayakalpa sadhana, which means the regeneration or transmutation of the body. In this episode, specifically, we're talking mostly about the preparation that has to happen and the ideas that center around purification, for the for the reversal, quote, unquote, of the intervention into the rhythm to be successful. And to do that, we need to go back to the Vedic sacrifice, because Siddha practices, like most of the things that have come in in this series that we've been doing on history are based around those sacrificial models. So let me, let's jog our memory just a quick bit before we go into specifics. Remember that the essence of the Vedic sacrifice is the triad fluid, fire and wind. So now we're in a space in Tantra and Hatha and alchemy, where the fluid, which remember was Soma, way back when, is considered to be semen or reproductive tissue. And in alchemy, in specific mercury, well, the fire, which was Agni, right in the Veda is now tapas, because this is an individual microcosm intervening in a rhythm. And so heat has to be generated in an unusual way in that particular microcosm. So this is the yogi or the alchemist, right, or the tantric, generating heat him or herself. And then, of course, there's prana, which is the wind. So we can go back to the Veda and find the origin of how preparation should be done and what purification might mean. So if Vedic ritual is the archetype, so to speak, for the the Siddhas idea of intervening in great nature, where is the cosmic rhythm in the Veda would be a really interesting question to ask in that could mean Rig Veda, that could mean in the brahmanas. Remember, we're talking about that large corpus of of literature. And David Gordon white points out that we do find that rhythm. There's a fundamental story about what he calls, quote, The alternation, which means the rhythm between manifestation and non manifestation, or the rhythm between fertility and total lack of fertility, and so on. So in this story, the primordial creator, which sometimes is purusha, and I think that's in the Rig Veda, then Prajapati is in the brahmanas. And as I understand it, they refer basically to the same primordial creature, primordial one. So in this scenario, purusha, having poured himself and out like a liquid into the manifest world, he lies broken and dying because he is emptied of his essence. This essence is the soma right, that that generates and creates the world and also restores the world, he will lie there broken and dying and eventually die unless he is restored to wholeness through a fire sacrifice. And so the story says that his son, who is Agni, the fire we've heard that before, Agni, builds a fire altar made out of a certain kind of brick of a certain proportion, and so on. And it has five basic levels. And in the building of this Fire Altar, he reconstitutes the body of his father, and performing the fire sacrifice, the father gets filled back up again with Soma, with the life giving elixir and fluid. And the alternation, or this going from empty to full is restored again through the fire sacrifice. Here's what David Gordon White says specifically about that alternation is restored, quote, only through the offering on the part of a human sacrificer of a major sacrifice. And so this notion that we participate in this rhythm and help sustain it through sacrifice goes way, way, way, way back. It's also very important to see here that that this is a story about something going from fullness in which its essence. Is in abundance in it to through an externalizing motion, that of making the world or pouring himself out, that there's a need for that to be regenerated. And the conditions, of course, are fulfilled through sacrifice. So in order to make a fire sacrifice, you have to prepare the ground and purify the ground. David Gordon, white, again, gives us really cool information about how that was done. Here's what he says about the land on which the sacrifice is going to take place. Purification of the land involved, quote, sealing off mundane parcels of land through a series of purificatory acts, plowing and cultivating the land, allowing it to lie fallow, and finally covering it with a layer of sand, which symbolized the seamen of the emptied Prajapati. So note first that the land is sealed off. This is pointing, in a way, to the techniques that bring us to stillness in Hatha. It points way far down the line to Banda, to Mudra, to things like that. You can see already in the Vedic sacrifice that in order for all this to get underway, something has to be sealed off in a certain way, but then it has to be purified. So here the the action is plowing and cultivating, then allowing it to lie fallow. And of course, it gets covered with sand, ie it gets fertilized. The land becomes the space upon which the Creator Purusha poured out His rasa, or poured out the soma. Now it's ready to produce seeds, or it's ready to have things planted in it, in the same way that the land had to be purified. The body of the sacrificer had to be purified. So the body of the person conducting the sacrifice has to be transformed in a certain way. Okay, it'll need to be sealed off in a certain way, if this pattern follows, and it'll need to be purified through some kind of fire, and in that case, it would be fit to conduct the sacrifice this process is is literally called diksha. And I think literally that term means something like habilitation. Generally you see it translated as initiation, and so the initiation of the sacrificer is a preparation and a purification for the sacrifice in this story I'm about to tell you note the images of gestation and of sexual reproduction. David Gordon White says this quote, sequestered within the initiation hut, the sacrificer is cooked through the inner heat of his austerities that would be the tapas and the external heat of burning fire that has been placed in the hut. He symbolically sheds his mundane body, an embryo of his new sacrificial body takes form, incubates, and is born out of, the quote, womb of the hut three days later. Well, this is a fascinating story. Obviously you see the metaphors of gestation, of birth, right of B of being also transformed this act of sweating, being cooked in a certain way in a fire. And there are two fires here. The external fire is obviously in the hut with the with the sacrificer. Now I heard some details about this, this ceremony, I believe, through Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Great Transformation, she says that the that the sacrificer was dressed in a a sheet that is to be understood as the placenta, or the call C, A, U, L, and that during this time of lying by the fire, the sacrifice has to lie in the fetal position and make certain gestures, certain sacrificial gestures. One of those is clinch, the clinching of the fists to to mimic the frustration of a newborn and a reflex, the grasping reflex, one is that the sacrificer had to stammer like a child that didn't know how to speak. And then to top all that off, all these gestures being made, all this sweat being produced, the sacrificer had to visualize. Is this whole scenario while it's happening inside, so that the heavenly world and the earthly world are connected. Amazing. So sit a practice this tantric Hatha Yoga alchemical matrix definitely appropriates from the Vedic world, this notion that something has to be sealed off or somehow immobilized and then purified through fire in order for it to be fit for certain ends or aims. Those ends would be in Hatha Yoga, the creation of the divine body. In alchemy, in like really metallurgically focused forms of ritual, it would be the ability to absorb being pure enough to absorb mercury that had been purified itself. So this pattern persists through Siddha practice, sometimes in this context, it's called Mastering or preparing the field kshetri Karana. That word kshetra is we know from the I learned from the Bhagavad Gita. The the field on which Arjuna and Krishna drive to the middle is called the dharmic Shera, kudukshetra. So here the body is a field definitely connected to the Vedic matrix that we've been talking about. Sometimes, though it's called purification of the elements, which means or which is Bucha. And I know several practitioners myself who have long been engaged because of their tantric band and their meditations to being engaged in this practice that basically looks like a practice of pranayama and visualization, in which the elements of the body are come into contact with the awareness and Feeling and visualization, and there's a sequence of events that's understood to be purifying that you go through. So both of these things, then would be considered techniques to refertalize the field, right? That would be the body, so it becomes a place where something can be planted and absorbed. I The idea of purification is really strong in the Hatha Yoga of the modern world. If we go to the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which is a relatively recent I'm not exactly sure when the dates are, but I would say definitely by, you know, between eight and 1100 CE, the there's a system of six purifications called shot Karmani. That means the six practices, and this is the basic sequence through which someone would be taken in order to prepare them or prepare the body for what's going to happen in practice. Let me run through them real quickly. One is called dauti, and that's cleansing the stomach by swallowing a strip of muslin cloth, a real soft kind of cloth that's been moistened, swallowed down into the stomach bit by bit by bit. And you retain some and then you pull it out really slowly, as I understood it, this is to rid the body of excess mucus, sometimes called Kapha in the literature, the stomach is the seat of this energy, and we know it has a mucus lining. So the beginning of the process of purification and preparation starts in the digestive tract in the in the most gross place about us, the the next one is Basti, or anima and enema is really, really utilized in Ayurveda. As most of you who are in Ayurveda will know, because the colon is the functioning of the colon is very, very important. And enemas are of different kinds, oil, different things. There's herbal things, and it's a way to medicate and so on. But it generally is for ridding the body of excess vata, excess air, because that's the seat of the air element. So when you do the stomach and the colon, you do, the major portions of the digestive system, a place where where accumulation is can be very strong, because stuff's moving through there all the time. That's the only part of us that's connected to the, you know, the outer world, in a sense. So then there's Nettie, most of y'all. Know that is nasal irrigation. Sometimes it was done with a cloth, right, or a string. And this keeps the nasal passages clear, because the Hatha yogas and the tantric is understand those nasal passages to go directly, sort of direct, more direct, access to the subtle body. You can breathe in through your mouth, but that breathing won't touch the subtle body in the same way that the that nostril breathing will. So those have to be kept clean. And there's a whole system of diagnosis of the of the human and diagnosis of the mind and so on, just by the nostril patterns in relation to the phase of the moon. The next one is chataka. This is candle gazing. Some of you may have known it as as gazing in a candle and then closing the eyes and continuing to visualize the candle. That's part of it. As I learned it, I learned that the point of it was to hold the eyes open long enough such that they began to water, and that that watering action will cleanse the fire element and the eye, of course, is the organ of fire, or the sensory portal of fire, both for receiving it radiance and for forgiving it, actually. So this would be a subtle form of purification of of what Ayurveda would call pitta, the Pitta dosha. This be a sub dosha. I think of Pitta. I might not be right about that, though the next one is now Lee or lauliki. Stomach churning, abdominal churning. Those of you who have seen many photos of practitioners or videos, you may have seen someone isolate their rectus abdominus in a certain motion, along with holding their breath out on exhalation, and then being able to move the rexus to the rectus, to the right, sometimes to and then to the left, and then eventually to to make a circle over and over in both directions. That making of a circle in both directions. Obviously, physically, it moves the intestines, and that is part of the deal here, too, but it also works in the area of the of the seat of the digestive fire, and so it's said to be stoking that inner flame. You can see that that one would come into play after the other two had cleaned it the tract, dalty and Basti. Then, then the fire starts to get stoked and managed in a in a certain way. The last one is kapalabhati. This literally means shining skull. It's in as we learned it, it's a Krea. It's not a pranayama. Some would disagree. It's maybe splitting hairs a little bit. And we have our reasons for that. This is about it's called shining skull because, as I understand it, it accesses one of the subtle five winds that run the system. The they're called values. We know that word from the Veda way back now, by the time of Hatha Yoga, though, that idea of wind has been medicalized in a certain sense and seen as the the forces, or imagined as the forces that run different functions in our body. Udana is the force of expression. It's the force that that brings strength. It it's also conceived considered to be the force that carries the soul to the next life, and so it needs to be strong. So because of the way that kalabati configures, the breath that particular wind is is accessed, as I learned it. So ending this list of purification, you see very subtle things, kind of we move from the stomach and the anus, through the nasal passages, make sure that the eyes, the visual mechanism, is seen, stoke the digestive fire and then clear the perceptual seat in the skull. It's a nice little sequence that that is actually based on the Vedic sacrifice. So if we get a little bit more specific, we can see further parallels between the groups of the Siddhas and further expressions that they're all engaged in this same process of that concerns itself with the production and maximization, optimization of essence. And that would be metal and sexual fluid in it. In Ayurveda, it's rasa. So I wanted to bring a few things to light about metal and alchemy in in specific, we've said that the alchemists and the Hatha yogis and the Tantrics are are all practicing a very similar thing. And so that means that people who were doing metallurgy or metal craft that was had a spiritual orientation. To it, which is what's going on in this case, where we're working with mercury, because mercury is a divine sexual fluid, and if, if left in the earth, it's going to eventually become gold, because all the metals are ripening in the earth in the same way that our sexual fluids are ripening inside us, and we're just intervening in that process. We're going to cook it and ripen it and then use it in a certain way. And so alchemy comes from metallurgy. Remember that, and the idea that there's this ripening process going on of this essence. So alchemists who are engaged in this process will ceaselessly cook mercury. They'll cook it in distillation vessels. Usually it has to be extracted from something called cinnabar, which is red. And there are many sacred sites where cinnabar is is mined and and used or had. And then once you cook it in a certain way, usually in some kind of distillation vessel where it's a it's cooked and in the evaporated stuff sticks to the top of the vessel, and then that can be scraped off. And it can happen over and over and over again until eventually you get quick silver, which continues to be purified. It's an amazing, strange process. Don't do that. Any of you out there listening, remember, we're doing history, and we're trying to understand a set of images for our imagination and in particular. So while all this purification of mercury is going on because the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm, the alchemist understands that he or she herself is being purified and needs to actively engage in that process. So strict diets are are observed over the course, usually of like a lunar fortnight, like 15 days of really strict diet in certain phases of the moon. And the idea there is to try to remove every bodily impurity with which the mercury that you're eventually going to ingest these tiny amounts of might react. So if we keep this idea of purification of mercury and the purification of the body and the rasa, or the sexual fluid in the in the body, and also that the Hatha Yogis were involved in this process, that means there's sweating, and there's techniques and so on, and there's those six purifications that I just mentioned, the shot Karmani. We can take these parallels about that. We're talking about purification and preparation further. So there are two. There are many techniques for purifying mercury, but there are two in particular that relate to Hatha Yoga in a really interesting way. One technique for purifying Mercury is called sweating. It's a form of cooking, and one is called rubbing. Sweating is svedana, and rubbing is moderna sedan. Or sweating is one of the primary techniques in Ayurveda. That that those of you who know Ayurveda will be concerned with, it's one of the ways to rid the excess fire element from the body. Mercury is sweated, and then at a certain point after it's been extracted, it has to be, quote, rubbed, and that means moved and and stirred in a way, or mixed in a way, and it eventually takes on that shine that we all know as quick silver through that process. Well, both of these obviously relate to the Vedic initiation. Remember the sacrifice or sweats in the hut as he behaves like an embryo in Hatha. Sweating was considered to be a sign that the shot Karmani have begun to work. And so when someone sweats freely in their practice, it's a sign that the flow inside the body is beginning to open up and that it also is remaining continuous. And so the idea was that you stay clean a little bit from the inside if you sweat in a certain way. Most of the techniques of Hatha, remember, in the space of forceful yoga, most of them are designed to be sweat inducing. And that would include the Pranayamas, if and the bandhas, as I understand them now more directly in relation to these practices and these images that we're calling Siddha Yoga. So after the period of sweating subsides, the Hatha Yoga is instructed to literally rub that sweat back into the skin. This. Is something that that I heard very long ago in Ashtanga vinyasa circles, because I practiced that form of Asana for a long time. This is something we were told to do, like right away, that when the first series was over, usually I was sweating at that time that we are to rub that sweat back in to the skin, so that that's an amazing practice that relates directly to alchemy, right? And the idea of purification and so on. I think what I find interesting about it is, is that when we do that, we treat the body in exactly the same way that the alchemist treats the mercury. We treat ourselves as if we are that rare substance. We treat ourselves as if we're going through this process that is aiming toward gold or consciousness, or whatever the in the case of the SIDs right, the adamantine body, the diamond body, so let's make a summary for the three intermingled branches of sitt practice, the creation of the immortal body and its powers of transmutation. That's the aim, remember, that has to be preceded by periods of preparation and purification. These elements of practice for the tantric Oh Hatha co alchemical practitioner, for the Siddhas, are patterned on the Vedic ritual, and we showed that through the story of Prajapati, rejuvenation via his son, Agni, piling a firing Fire Altar that reconstituted his body and then conducting a ritual that filled him back up with his essence. In Hatha and alchemy, the same process is going on. It's been internalized in the same way that the Vedic sacrifice got internalized in the Upanishads, for instance, in Hatha and alchemy, it's called Preparing the field. Remember kshetrana In tantric ritual, more so it's called purification of the elements, or Bucha. These two practices are deeply symbolic and involved in purification, preparation of the physical body so that it doesn't interfere with what is supposed to make its way to the subtle body. After this process of purification and preparation is is successful, we still then have reversal. And reversal is preceded by something called immobilization. So the next episode, we're going to talk specifically about that. What is this obsession with bringing something to stillness? I hope this has been interesting for all of you, we sure appreciate your listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.