Dissolving Difference: Shiva Sutra 3.17
3.17: svamātrā nirmāṇamā pādayati // “He can bring about forms in accordance with that measure or aspect of consciousness which is creative and in which he is established."
- (Jai Deva Singh Translation)
Your Meditation practice really does change your reality! It might not happen overnight, but as you become established in your practice, eventually that work ‘congeals’ to bring you to a new level of awareness, as this Sutra teaches us. What is so fascinating about the Yogic tradition, is that the practice itself cannot be encapsulated in a word, phrase, text or specific exercise, but is instead an exceedingly personal endeavor that requires the dissolving of difference that our mind constantly presents us with throughout our day. And we find that it is this dissolution of difference which ultimately reveals the state of unity which is at the heart of our practice.
Jai Shiva!
Class Notes (Slides Above, Text Below):
Class Notes:
3.17: svamātrānirmāṇamāpādayati // He can bring about forms in accordance with that measure or aspect of consciousness which is creative and in which he is established."
svamātrā: The measure of consciousness which coagulates
nirmāṇamā : Produces/Creates
pādayati: Effects
“Svamatra means the measure pertaining to his consciousness, i.e. the aspect of the essence of consciousness that coagulates, that creates.”
-Ksemaraja (JDS Translation)
“By taking the deception of grossness, they become gross in this universe and by taking the deception of subtleness, they becomes subtle.” -Svacchanda Tantra 4.295 (LMJ Translation)
“Because of the power of creative thought (vimarsa sakti), the foundational Self makes Itself as the object of knowledge. The object has no separate existence of its own. If the Self were to depend upon an object, something outside itself, for creation, the Self’s absolute freedom would be violated."
-Isvara-pratyabhijna I, 5, 15 (JDS Translation)
“O dear one, one who knows from the mouth of his spiritual director that water and ice are (essentially) the same (is liberated). He has no further obligation to discharge. He will have no further birth." -Agamas
“This state, which is the real nature of Śiva, is not revealed; this state is the revealer…The revealed is not the point to be sought; it is the revealer that is to be striven for.”
- Lakshmanjoo, Shiva Sutra 3.16 Commentary
Rudi Quote: “We are locked in so many of these things because of our need to be in the mind— to refute, to fight and endlessly find the differences— whereas when we're strong enough to know it's all one, then we have the capacity to be above it. All of those so called differences lead to the same oneness. And you have to do this in your own life. You have to do this with the people you work with and the people you live with, and the people you bond with. You either eventually love with them, and you all go up together, or you endlessly try to find differences. The differences never made a man free, it was the lack of difference that always freed people. It is to find the lack of difference for which you are living, because this holds within it the content, this flow of higher consciousness and energy. Difference makes walls, lack of difference breaks down walls. You must really open to that and feel the lack of difference, and then we drink it in, and the nourishment comes into all of us.”
-Swami Rudrananda