Primal Wisdom

There is a beautiful chant that repeats these words:

Aad guray nameh
Jugaad guray nameh
Sat guray nameh
Siri guru dayvay nameh 

You can listen to Deva Premal signing it on YouTube: 

Translated, it means:
I bow to the Primal Wisdom
I bow to the Wisdom woven throughout time and the ages
I bow to the True Wisdom
I bow to the Great Divine, invisible Wisdom

This is a lovely expression of the offering of our limited selves to the primal wisdom that is the power of creation, the source of all that exists. We are bowing to the great unseen wisdom whose great glory will always be. 

A form of the word guru is used throughout the chant. Guru means the remover of darkness, and the chant is therefore suggesting that it is the light of primal wisdom that reveals to us our own misunderstanding. Then, knowledge of our misunderstanding becomes a means of dispelling the darkness. A guru will most likely appear in our lives as a teacher who embodies the energy of a lineage: a connection that enables the eternal light to shine forth and resonate within our individuated awareness.

Look for the Light 

Primal wisdom is a radiance that is perpetually emanating from the Heart of God, and it’s called prakaāśa, the light of Consciousness. The companion term is vimarśa, which means self-reflective capacity. In this context, vimarśa is the Supreme Light that knows Itself as the Light. And guess what? You are that light!

Opening to primal wisdom and moving beyond our contracted awareness is a progressive loop in our sādhana. Our willingness to surrender to that wisdom enables us to surrender the misunderstanding — to move beyond the dimension of our awareness called ego, which holds on to the darkness and perpetuates it. Then the more we surrender the darkness of contracted awareness, the more light can shine forth. You could say that the essence of any authentic spiritual practice is to surrender to the light and to surrender that which is blocking the light from your vision. 

What greater miracle, what greater gift from our own Divine Self than the voice that says, Here: open your eyes, look from the light of your heart. Do not look from the darkness of the mind that is perpetually buried in contraction, tension, pattern, projection, need, and demand. Those are the building blocks of misunderstanding.

When Darkness Appears

But as you look for the light, you may also see some darkness. You may see the contracted awareness that is trapped in mind and emotion. The capacity of consciousness to know itself as consciousness also can also see its own limitations. As Supreme Consciousness is expressing Itself within us as individuals, unlimited Consciousness gets obscured by the dance of the ego, the very dance of misunderstanding. We get stuck in the belief that we are separate from our Source because, obscured by inner darkness, only limitation is apparent to us.

So the chant is suggesting to us, surrender that misunderstanding. Or, as our Sat-Guru Nityananda put it, Surrender everything that keeps you from Śiva. Surrender everything that keeps you from your own primal wisdom. 

As we come face to face with that need to surrender our contracted, ego-bound awareness, we must be truthful. We have to ask ourselves: what is it that I’m unprepared to surrender to know the Truth of my existence? What do I hold on to that blocks me from knowing that I am a living expression of that primal wisdom? 

Lay Down the Fight

My teacher Rudi said that the only thing you must give up is your tension — and he wasn't talking about being pissed off about being cut off on the highway. What we come up against is the tension of ego, of misunderstanding — which is, at the deepest level, the tension of holding on to our limited self. To surrender that small self, we must recognize that we're functioning from ego. But we unfortunately hold on to ego and reinforce it by rewriting our individuated story every two minutes! It's an epic. 

One of the early great writings of the Indian tradition is the Mahabharata, which contains the Guru Gita. It describes an epic battle that repeatedly plays out in our own lives, lifetime after lifetime, until we finally lay down the fight. Think of the extraordinary energy that we spend in the fight! What if we took that energy and fueled our offering, fueled that very innate freedom in ourselves?

There's also a wonderful American Indian story that describes two forces within us, the good dog and the bad dog. They represent the voices of surrender versus self-serving willfulness that we discover inside our own awareness. And the story ends with a question: which dog are you going to feed? I was once talking with an American Indian who found the story so beautiful because he felt that ultimately, the bad dog is going to give up when it's not being fed and become a good dog.

So, we feed the highest in ourselves by bowing down to that primal wisdom, bowing in gratitude to the miracle in our life that we can know the that Light as our TrueSelf. And if that requires surrendering of some misunderstanding, some tension, some pattern, some demand, some need to control. . . as Rudi said: What a bargain, where do I pay? 

My suggestion to you is bow down today, not tomorrow, not 10 years from now. Don’t let that impulse of surrender diminish. That willingness was evoked in you by God's Grace so that you can know Your Self. Feed your wish to grow, and it will reveal the miracle of Consciousness that dwells within you.