The Radiance Sutras

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Lorin Roche. Lorin Roche has taught meditation for more than 40 years, developing an approach he calls ‘Instinctive Meditation”—which works with each person’s uniqueness from the inside out. He has written several popular books, including Meditation Made Easy. With Sounds True, Lorin has released the audio program Meditation for Yoga Lovers.

Lorin Roche has also written a new book with Sounds True called The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight. The Radiance Sutras is a book that was originally self-published, passed person-to-person within the yoga community, and has received comments like this—here’s one from Jack Kornfield, who writes, ‘If you love Rumi, Hafiz, the Tao; if you love words dancing out of the mystery, welcome to The Radiance Sutras. These are among the most profound and luminous verses you will ever read.’

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Lorin and I spoke about The Radiance Sutras and his own unique process of translating the original Sanskrit into inspired, poetic renditions; and how he felt compelled to work on his compositions during the hours right before dawn. We also talked about his discoveries in listening to thousands of meditators talk about their most intimate meditation experiences. Lorin also read for us three of his favorite of the 112 verses that make up The Radiance Sutras. Here’s my conversation with Lorin Roche:

Lorin, I want to talk to you about The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight. I notice that—right here at the beginning of our conversation—I feel cautious because this book feels so sacred to me. You’ve poured so much heart and soul into these creative renderings of this original text that I want to proceed carefully. Right here at the beginning, [I want to] understand from you a little bit your history with The Radiance Sutras and what the original text—the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra—what this text means to you personally.

LR: When I was 18, I was working my way through college at the University of California at Irvine. I had been working in a gas station and then [mowed] the greens at Irvine Coast Country Club. This lab—a physiology lab—was paying good money—more than I made at the golf course. They were paying good money for research subjects. I wound up being a control subject just by the flip of a coin.

This first study was on brainwaves. Other people got biofeedback. And me—they just paid me to sit in a completely dark room that was completely soundproofed for hours a day. Fortunately, it was in the afternoon. It was a good time.

So, I was sitting there in the lab in pitch black, in total silence, climate-controlled, wired up with wires all over my head and on my hands. Sometimes on my chest, for heartbeat. So, I couldn’t move much. I had to just be there.

From the very first time, I just melted into silence. Being a surfer, paddling out at dawn is always kind of scary. It’s always weird to paddle out in the dark and just be alone in the ocean with your feet dangling below the board. That’s a little bit scary.

But being in the dark in the lab wasn’t scary. At first, it was just nothing. And then, to my surprise, I found that I just melted into the blackness. After a while, my sense of self dissolved into space. The blackness and the emptiness became almost liquid. It almost felt like there was something friendly in the nothingness.

I’d never heard of this. I’d never taken drugs. I think I’d heard of marijuana. I was a like a loner-surfer. I didn’t go to parties. I really hadn’t heard of meditation, either.

So, I was just approaching the darkness and silence like somebody who’s in nature would approach leaning against a tree and waiting for the sun to rise. Or just sitting there, doing nothing.

This experience of silence became very physical. A thought would come or I would notice, ‘Hmm. I’m really relaxed.’Then couple minutes later, another thought would come. Like noticing—just a perception of noticing something interesting. But between that, I actually had no thoughts. I was aware of existing, and that was it. I’d never heard of such a thing and I had never experienced this before.

I was happy in there for hours. The first time—after they had gotten enough data after two hours—the guy said, ‘OK, that’s enough.’Then I said, ‘I think you better give me a while.’And it took me about 45 minutes to reassemble myself before I felt ready to come out of the room.

When I walked outside of the lab into one of these brilliant afternoons that we have near the beach in California, the world had a beautiful quality that I had never seen before. People—the living things—glowed from within. I had never seen this. The trees glowed and people looked incredible to me. I had never seen this.

It was really a function of the deep relaxation that I had experienced. We could say that that’s what it feels like when you have no noise in your system. That the world is that luscious.

I went to the lab every day during the week—five days a week for the better part of a month. The experience just stayed pretty much the same. Maybe it deepened as I got used to functioning in this state.

I remember taking calculus tests and writing essays in English class, enjoying how my brain was functioning beautifully. It was a couple days into the experiment in the lab, and I was taking a calculus test. I was solving a problem, and in my mind’s eye, I glanced over to the left. I could see in my imagination the page of the textbook where the formula was. I could see it in my mind’s eye and then derive it live—work it and solve the problem.

This [was] great because usually, I used to get nervous on tests. After the test was over, I would remember what the answer was. This was a [real] change in style. I became a clutch hitter—where I was walking around the world slightly too relaxed. Then, when there would be something exciting like a test, it would move me up to a more optimal level of functioning.

So, this is really relaxation plus all of the senses working. Calling it ‘mindfulness’is just like a cover story for what we could maybe call ‘embodiment.’

The experiment went on for maybe three weeks or so. And then this state of deep relaxation and heightened sensing lasted for a month or so. Then it started to fade away. And I went, ‘Oh no! It’s going away!’It was then I started to hear about meditation and read books and start experimenting with techniques.

But I’ve always believed since then—it’s been my sense that meditation happens spontaneously. I know that in my bones. I’ve tested that for 45 years with thousands of people. I know that people go into meditation spontaneously. Each person in their own way. For some people, it’s watching the dog breathe when he or she sleeps.

After searching desperately for lots of different things and reading lots of books—and nothing really worked very well—I finally got some coaching on how to develop a daily meditation practice.

TS: And then, Lorin, bringing us up to your encounter with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra—the text from which The Radiance Sutras are composed or based on.

LR: Well, I got a job in the lab. They needed people to run experiments and wire people up to the brainwave machines and so forth.

So, I got a job in the lab. There was a staff meeting where the graduate students that worked in the lab were all sitting around. One of the people who worked in the lab had just come back from a silent retreat where they were using the first English translation of the Bhairava Tantra as a text. It’s in this little book published by the name of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. In the back of the book, there’s this 14-page section called ‘Centering.’It’s a translation of the text that Lakshman Joo did with this man Paul Reps in the ’50s.

She read a couple of paragraphs from the Bhairava Tantra. Just a light bulb went off inside me. I said, ‘That’s it!’Whoever wrote that—whoever composed that—they had an experience. They’re speaking from the experience that I had in the lab. I recognized the voice.

She had read a couple of the lines where the goddess is talking to Shiva. In that moment, my life changed. There was a flash and I knew someone else had that experience of spontaneous [meditation]—that life is right here, and enlightenment is right here. Some people live in it totally. But this is something that we all know and have access to.

There’s a generous feeling to the text. It’s just, ‘Come. You who are seeking, come. I am here. I am always here. Whenever you want, take a breath. I am right here. I’m the breath inside of the breath that you’re breathing right now.’This wonderful, generous, accepting voice of the text. ‘I’m always here.’

Something in that just radiated from the words on the page. So, I jumped in my Volkswagen Bug and went and bought the book. And I still have it—the worn-out copy.

Later, as part of research at the lab, I was asked to teach meditation. It was the ’60s, and one thing led to another. So, people would ask me to teach them to meditate. Because I didn’t know what I was doing, I would say something like, ‘What makes you interested in meditation? What makes you think there is such a thing?’And, ‘When have you experienced something that feels like meditation?’is what I would say in a more friendly way.

And then I would listen. Somebody would say, ‘Well, I was golfing. I was out at dawn watching. One time, instead of hitting the ball, I just looked around. And looking at the horizon makes me feel so peaceful.’

Or, ‘I was listening to music.’Or, ‘I was dancing, and then I laid down and my body was flooded with ecstasy.’Or, ‘I was fishing and I was just watching the light sparkle on the water, and I was transported.’

Or, ‘I was nursing the baby in the middle of the night. I got up to nurse the baby and I fell like half asleep with the baby in my arms. I dissolved into a kind of ecstasy.’

So, just listened to people describe their natural meditative experiences. Then, I would open that little 14-page section in the back of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones—the first translation of the Bhairava Tantra. I would just open it, show them one of those practices, and say, ‘Does that sound like you?’They’d look at it and say, ‘Yes! That’s what I experienced.’And then I would say something like, ‘Well, I wonder how we could build a practice around that. I wonder how you could visit that state more consistently.’

So, because I didn’t know what I was doing—I hadn’t been trained as a teacher yet—I would just listen to people describe to me their own natural gateways into meditation. In this way, I became more familiar with the way that these 112 meditation techniques not only show up in people’s daily lives, but also actually [call] to them.

They discovered that when people come to learn to meditate, it’s because they already know. They’ve already tasted it. Usually many times. Once and a while, it might just be once. ‘Well, I had this one experience.’But usually, people have had many experiences of meditation and it’s calling them. Their own yearning for union with their own essence is calling them.

My job as a teacher is more like what a voice coach does. The person already is singing—I’m just helping them to bring out their natural voice.

I’ve had to listen to people. I used to do two-hour interviews where I’d just listen to people until they couldn’t talk anymore. It’s amazing to have someone tell you about their greatest experience. Like, ‘Tell me about the time when you felt utterly at home in the world or utterly delighted to be alive. Tell me about that time.’Or, ‘Tell me about a problem you’re having in your meditation.’

If you listen for two hours, at a certain point a person will just run out of words. They’ll be looking at you and they can’t say one more word. [Laughs.] And they’ll just dissolve into silence. They go into Samadhi spontaneously and they’ll make up their own meditation practice. They’ll actually go into their own native—their own most natural meditation practice. Then you can interview them, find out what they’re doing.

But I’m wandering a bit. I would listen to people talk about their own natural meditation experiences. Then we would look through the Bhairava Tantra for what sounds like that—and then build their practice in that way.

So, over the years, this became great fun. [Laughs.] This sense that people actually have very precise, technical knowledge inside of them about what meditation to do. And that they actually even can sense the naturalness of it.

TS: Now, interestingly, you make this point towards the end of the book where you’re talking about tips for people for engaging with the Sutras. You say, ‘The skills of meditation are the same skills as loving anyone or anything.’

That’s very interesting. I don’t think most people would describe the skills of meditation as being the same as the skills of loving anyone or anything. But as you’re talking, that’s what is coming up for me.

LR: When we love, we pay attention and we cherish [that which] we love. We cherish. We adore that which we love.

So, when we love someone or something, we want to pay attention to them. We’re engaged. We delight in the existence of that phenomenon—that dog, that son, that star. That arena of sport. Skateboarding—whatever our sport is. Our attention is called to engage with that aspect of creation.

A quick formula—like E=MC2—for, ‘What’s a meditation technique?’is, ‘Select an aspect of prana that you love so much you want to merge with it.”

A way of defining meditation is, ‘Select an aspect of prana, or of the life-force, that you love and be with it.’That’s kind of it. There’s a lot of steps. There’s a lot of micro-skills—like the skill of loving someone.

It’s a skill to not wake somebody up in the middle of the night. Or if they do want to be woken up. Say, you come home from a trip. Do you wake your lover up at one in the morning, or do you let her sleep? That’s a skill. Knowing when it’s appropriate to do either is a whole skill set. It’s like that with our inner world as well.

TS: Interestingly, Lorin, in the beginning of The Radiance Sutras, you talk about how the actual name of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra—loosely translated—means ‘The Terror and Joy of Realizing Oneness with the Soul.’I thought it would be interesting to hear a little bit about this sense of ‘terror.’What’s the terror?

LR: Well, ‘Bhairava’means ‘terrific or terrifying”—among a hundred other things. In the tradition that the text comes from, there’s a kind of jargon where Abhinavagupta—one of the legendary teachers back in the day—he used this phrase, ‘Those terrified,’to talk about people who are on the path.

It means you wake up to the point [where] you realize, ‘Oh my God. The universe is huge and I’m tiny and I’m here for two milliseconds, and then I’m gone. Why don’t I wake up?’‘Those terrified,’is like an honor. It’s like you’ve woken up to realize how little you are and how short time is. You better get a move on.

So, that’s another meaning of ‘terrified.’That you’re contemplating the terrifying ecstasy that’s all around us at all times.

There’s something scary about when you go to see a therapist for the first time. Or even every time. Or when you go to your first yoga class. When you have a conversation with somebody and you say, ‘There’s something untrue going on here.’Or you say, ‘I love you.’It’s terrifying to go up to somebody and say, ‘I love you and let’s go out on a date.’It’s scary to take that step on the path.

So, [I think] ‘Bhairava’means all of those things. Also, Bhairava is that aspect of God that accepts our terror as the most sincere form of prayer. That inside of our fear is this ‘I-am-ness.’Inside of our tremulousness at taking the steps that we need to take. Inside of that trembling, there is an energy and a consciousness of the divine.

Right there, when we’re taking the scary steps that we need to take, there’s the presence of the divine. I think that’s another meaning of Bhairava.

TS: Now, Lorin, for people who are just hearing about the Bhairava Tantra for the very first time, what do we know about who originally composed this text [and in] what time period? How has it been preserved and passed on to us in its original form?

LR: This is a classic yoga text. It’s beloved because—in a succinct from—it mentions 112 different pathways into meditation. It showed up as a text apparently around 800 AD in Kashmir. As was the tradition, the composers attribute the text to Devi, the goddess, and Shiva or Bhairava.

So, it’s as if they’re always singing this in our hearts. The text was written down by humans, but the song of it is always vibrating everywhere.

It was preserved through the oral tradition and in writing for—how many years is that? Twelve hundred-some years.

TS: And if you had to summarize—and this may be hard. But if you had to summarize what you think the most important philosophical insights—if you will—are of the Bhairava Tantra, what would you say are the biggest ones?

LR: The text says in over a hundred ways, ‘It’s right here. Inside of your most intimate experience is a pathway into meditation. Just answer that call.’

If you’re running from battle or at a football game where people are screaming. If you’re in the middle of sex or you’re dancing. Or you’re enraptured by a piece of music. Or if you’re tasting something incredibly delicious. Or you’re just breathing—you’re falling asleep. You’re alone in the middle of the night in a spooky place.

In all of these experiences, wherever you are, just pay attention. Just go right into the experience, and then go even deeper. Find the places where your own life is calling you and then keep on going deeper—right into the intensity of experience. Feel every molecule of it.

The presence of the divine is right here.

[Audio cuts out for a moment.]

It’s the consistent voice of the text. And it’s always surprising. I’m continually surprised by this text. I don’t feel like an expert at the text at all. That’s why it’s so much fun to go and have everybody else read The Radiance Sutras—because they hear it differently than me, and they bring out different tones in it. [Laughs.] It’s always surprising.

TS: What I found too, was that there was a tremendous sensuousness in the way that you are delivering the meaning of the Bhairava Tantra. Do you think that’s inherent in the text itself—this tremendous sensuous quality?

LR: I do. It’s inherent. I primarily use the full, dictionary definition of each Sanskrit word. And often, [there are] juicy images and funny puns and wacky metaphors within each word. Like the definition of kāma, which is sensual desire, would also include a temple. When we’re in love—especially erotic love—it feels like being in a temple. In happy, erotic love. It’s like, ‘I’m in a temple.’

Another phrase in the definition [of kāma] is, ‘A stake in gambling.’And doesn’t it feel like a gamble to be in erotic love? I love that it’s sensuous pleasure, a temple, and a stake in gambling. So, all the Sanskrit words tend to be packed with meaning like that.

TS: It’s interesting too that the entire text is a dialogue between lovers.

LR: Yes. And there’s layers of puns. Sometimes after, I read the text over and over again. Like, every few years I’ll spend three or four months just thinking in the text in Sanskrit—all day long and every day for months.

I’ll get to a state where I can hear the jokes. There’s puns within the sentence, but then on another level it’s making fun of the whole idea of what it’s doing. I’ll just be walking around laughing for days because there are so many intricate, almost like Scrabble jokes inside of the Sanskrit.

[For example,] the word used to talk about chakras might have something about melting. And then it has a meaning [of], ‘To delight in anything.’(I’m just reading the dictionary.) And ‘embrace.’In music, kind of time. And the union of song, dance, and instrumental music.

That’s just reading the definition of a word that’s often associated with chakras.

TS: Now, Lorin, you write that, ‘Tantric texts want to be performed. They’re not comfortable being hidden in books.’Given that, I wonder if you would be willing to read us one or two of your favorite verses from The Radiance Sutras.

LR: OK. So, this is ‘98,’which starts with the word bhakti:

[Lorin reads the sutra in its original Sanskrit.]

‘Be wildly devoted to someone or something.
Cherish every perception.
At the same time, forget about control.
Allow the Beloved to be herself and to change.

Passion and compassion, holding and letting go.
This ache in your heart is holy.
Accept it as the rise of intimacy
With life’s secret ways.

Devotion is the divine streaming through you
From that place in you before time.
Love’s energy flows through your body,
Toward a body and into eternity again.
Surrender to this current of devotion
And become one with the body of love.’

TS: Beautiful.

Now, before we hear another one of the verses from The Radiance Sutras, I’d love to know a little bit more of your process of the translation from the original Sanskrit. How did you approach each one of these 112 verses?

LR: I’ll usually take up the whole floor. I’ll write out in big letters the definitions of each word. And there’s . . . [Lorin quietly counts to himself.] There’s a lot of words in this one that are shorter. So, there’s about 14 words in these 32 syllables.

So, I’ll take each word and make a series of cards on the floor with the images inside each word. I’ll actually write out the full definition. I use the Monier Williams, primarily—the Monier Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary.

Then I’ll write out different throwaway comments—usually Lakshman Joo, this swami who was the master of this text in the twentieth century. Any comments that he’s made—I’ll put those.

I’ll spread it out on the floor and walk around inside of it, chanting the Sanskrit. So, I’m holding my attention on all the layers of meaning of each word, [as well as] listening to the sound structure and rhythm.

Sometimes, weeks go by and I don’t get a line of English that sounds as good as the Sanskrit. And other times, it’s immediate—I’ll get one line or two lines. I’m like, ‘Oh, that works. That clicks.’But then the rest of the verses—it can take months. It’s like, ‘No, that’s not it. That doesn’t work. On the page, it doesn’t work.’Like as what I’m calling a sutra.

Some of them come right away—like I’m hearing the voice of the text. Sometimes, the sutra will wake me up in the morning—at four in the morning with the Sanskrit written in neon. [Laughs.] It says, ‘Come! Come, Lorin!’Like with dogs—saying, ‘Go for a walk!’The Sanskrit says, ‘Come! Let’s play!’I’ll come out into the living room office and walk around.

So, actually I do most of the work standing and walking around at four to six in the morning, before dawn. Listening. It’s a special time for Sanskrit. I’ll just let the Sanskrit become part of my blood so that it’s singing itself to me.

Then I’ll pray, ‘Will you please give me some English?’[Laughs.] It’s like, ‘OK, I’ve been showing up here for a month. Give me something.’

And then, other times—this happens to all writers—it starts flowing. It says, ‘OK,’and then it won’t stop for days. You risk total exhaustion.

I’ll usually do maybe 100 different versions of each verse of the Sanskrit.

TS: Wow!

LR: And some of them—because there’s so many images in the Sanskrit. The one that’s in the book—for some reason, it looks good on the page. It works as—I don’t know if this is poetry. I wish that I had studied poetry. This is just easy on the eye, on the page. Sometimes, the other verses that aren’t published are much more entertaining, but they stray too far from the Sanskrit.

It begs to be played with, though. It’s [clear] that the text wants to be played with.

TS: Lorin, have you studied Sanskrit in terms of reading it and speaking Sanskrit? Or are you working more with these dictionary definitions and images, and then writing your own creative poem?

LR: I’m working with the dictionary definitions of each word. I [have consulted] Sanskrit scholars over decades. ‘What do you think of this?’

The Sanskrit is compressed to fit into 32 syllables per verse. They dissolve word boundaries. There’s things that I have to check.

But by and large, the text uses classical Sanskrit. So, you can just look it up in the Sanskrit dictionary.

This is a different approach. My approach to working with the text is different than, say, the Indologists or people trained in historical criticism. When people learn Sanskrit, they might be in the tradition of historical criticism. So, they’re trained to approach the text as Western people in a university looking at a historical document.

So, they have a tradition of scholarship. And I’ve read all of their stuff, and I love it.

Then there are Western scholars with PhDs or a master’s degree in Indology or Sanskrit, or whatever. And they also practice the techniques. So, there’s different traditions.

My approach is the semantic field, where I studied anthropology for one of my jobs as an undergraduate. One of the things I did for many years in my PhD program was a specific type of interview—where you ask somebody who’s an expert, ‘What does this word mean?’It’s called an ‘elicitation interview.’It’s similar to creating a dictionary—where you ask someone who’s an informant—who’s an expert in their field—”Well, what does this word mean?’And then you write down what they say.

What you get is something that looks like the Sanskrit dictionary. You get a set of images and applications.

So, I’m approaching the Sanskrit as if it’s written from experience. I’m approaching the definitions of the Sanskrit words as if they’re giving clues to the experience of that meditation technique.

I spent thousands and thousands of hours listening to meditators as part of research projects. ‘Well, tell me—what do you feel when you’re inside your breathing? What do you feel when you’re doing this technique? How do you experience the chakras? How do you experience the energies flowing in your body? What happens when the mantra you’re listening to dissolves into silence?’

So, I spent thousands and thousands of hours interviewing meditators and writing down—making notes—on their experience. There’s a similarity between the way people sound when they’re in the midst of their meditation experience and the imagery and Sanskrit words used to describe that experience. That’s really all I’m saying. It’s kind of obvious when you put it that way.

I’m a meditation teacher and someone with a PhD in the semantic structure of the meditation experience. What the structure [is] in the language when meditators are speaking of their inner world. As that, I’m listening to the Sanskrit.

So, those are the means that I bring. It’s different than I’d say what a professor of Sanskrit—

TS: Sure.

LR: —at a university might call a rendition of the text.

TS: Sure. Now, Lorin, you mention that you composed your translations in the pre-dawn quiet, and that that was important for some reason. Tell me why you think that was important.

LR: This hour of Brahman—there’s something that happens before dawn. There’s a kind of buzz. There’s a vibe in the air that’s good for this kind of work.

So, almost all of the work [has] been started—if I work all day, I feel I started at four in the morning. I’m there and the only thing that’s happening is the Sanskrit humming in my blood. I’m stone-cold sober. I’m letting the Sanskrit feed me, entertain me, and keep me awake.

I’m really hanging suspended in the blackness with nothing but the music of the Sanskrit to entertain me and enchant me. Then I start to engage the intellectual component of, ‘All right. Here’s this series of words. Why did the composer pick that word? Why did they start with ‘bhakti?’‘ Then I let the spirit of the Sanskrit—the spirit of the text—infuse the academic part, where I’m basically letting these images in the Sanskrit arrange themselves into English words on the page.

I just think it would be very different to do the translation late at night. I can’t imagine originating this stuff late at night. I don’t know why.

TS: OK. Let’s hear another one of your favorite verses from The Radiance Sutras.

LR: Well, this is ‘16.’It starts with the word pranava—which is the nickname of om. And it has the sense of a shout of joy or exuberance:

‘The roar of joy that set the worlds in motion
Is reverberating in your body
And the space between all bodies.
Beloved, listen.

Find that exuberant vibration
Rising new in every moment,
Humming in your secret places,
Resounding through the channels of delight.
Know you are flooded by it always.

Float with the sound.
Melt with it into divine silence.
The sacred power of space will carry you
Into the dancing, radiant emptiness
That is the source of all.
The ocean of sound is inviting you
Into its spacious embrace,
Calling you home.’

TS: At one point, Lorin, you talk about these 112 gateways as being, ‘practices for entering divine perception.’I wonder if you can tell us what you mean by that—‘divine perception.’

LR: Well, I’m not sure what I mean by that. It’s somehow—I try not to use the word ‘God.’So, I think it’s used once in the sutras. ‘Divine’came because it’s an honor to the way that Lakshman Joo—who is the swami who was the custodian of this text—and Jaideva Singh, one of his disciples, I guess. They talk about it as ‘divine awareness.’The term ‘divine awareness’is implied in the Sanskrit ‘Shiva’and the god of being divine. It felt like I had to use that word once or twice.

In this context, it’s the sense that life is infinitely precious. I think everybody has their own sense of the divine. It’s a reverence. I think divine consciousness is a sort of reverence for the mystery of things. It’s a reverence for the existence of bodies and individuals and mountains and things on this planet.

TS: Now, in the last section of the book, you offer tips for engaging with the 112 verses. I thought it would be good to go over a couple of these tips, because I think they’re interesting. So, I’m going to call a couple out and see what kind of commentary you might have.

So, the first one that I thought would be interesting to highlight is, ‘Respect the power of your love.’How will that help me [in] engaging with The Radiance Sutras? ‘Respect the power of your love.’

LR: If you ask people what [they] love, they’ll say things like ‘gardening.’And you can watch their entire body change. It’s like they’re on their knees. And what is it? They’re on their knees in the garden tending to little, living things.

So, you build the practice around that. It’s the style of awareness. The style of attention—or if you want to call it that, there’s a style of mindfulness people bring to their hobbies and their love. That’s what you want to build on for your meditation practice.

TS: OK. You had another tip here for engaging with The Radiance Sutras: to ‘honor your individuality.’

LR: It’s really important to feel free to say no. Say no to 111 different meditation techniques—like the sutras—and just love one. It’s OK to go, ‘No,’and just to hate counting the breath or hate sitting still. Some people just hate to sit still to meditate. They just do. And you don’t want to break their spirit. Help them find something they don’t hate.

So, our individuality is to be cherished and only modified—you only want to operate on it if absolutely necessary.

Like in the military—in boot camp. It’s not about your preferences. They break you. They break you down and build you up. And if you join a monastery or a nunnery, [it’s] the same thing. Or in reform school or something like that.

Day by day, if you have a house and kids or a dog and people you love and a job, meditation in general shouldn’t be breaking you down. It should be a place for rest and [building] you up. If the world beats us down—the world tires us out—enough, we don’t need meditation to be brutal.

So, yes. For people that are what are called ‘householders’who are on the path of intimacy, you want to—whenever possible—indulge your preferences and explore them. There will be plenty of times when you’re doing tedious chores.

TS: OK: ‘Welcome your wildness.’

LR: That’s really, really important. And it’s a difficult thing for people to grasp. When you’re meditating, you actually want to sit there vibrating with excitement. You want the space of meditation to be welcoming towards all of your wild impulses. It should feel saucy—like an affair. You’re having an affair with the life-force.

There’s something maybe a little risky—like in the Krishna worship and bhakti, even the housewives would sneak off in the middle of the night to play with Krishna down by the river. They’re risking everything. They’re tiptoeing away from their children and their husbands lying asleep and they’re going off to party with Krishna. They’re risking everything. It’s an affair. It’s an affair with God.

So, in meditation, you want it to be inclusive of all of your tones. You want to be free to be totally exhausted, totally disgusted with everything. And other times, ‘Ah, what an incredible relief! I get to sit here and just savor the experience of being alive.’That’s like an indulgence.

[After all,] how much time do we have to meditate in a day? I mean, we’re all lucky if we get 20 minutes a day, really. So, we’ve got to plunge right into being renewed and rejuvenated, letting go of stress and letting our own inner life-force rejuvenate us and heal us. Breathe new life into our wounded places.

TS: And then one final tip here—both for engaging with the verses and for meditation practice itself. You write, ‘Develop expression that is commensurate with your communion.’

LR: Yes. Yes, because you can go both ways. Meditators can develop such a rich sense of their inner life—especially over a period of a year or two—that they develop all these energies. They’re seeing all these things in their inner world.

And it can actually create loneliness if they don’t know how to speak from it. It’s really challenging to speak from the heart or speak from the belly or speak from other places in the body. It’s really an adventure to find language or dance moves or ways of touching where we’re coming from inside the body.

So, when people meditate and they get a few hundred or a few thousand hours of meditation—and they’ve developed an inner world—it can become a separate thing than the outer world. And so, people get stuck in their meditation—it doesn’t flow into their outer world. It’s a danger for meditators.

The way of expressing can be different for each person. It can be singing in a karaoke bar, or dancing—learning to dance, walking the dogs, being in nature, [or] gardening. But we need to spend hours of time expressing ourselves in a way that feels like we’re expressing our own soul out into the world.

It happened to me in my early 20s because I had done so much intense training as a meditation teacher by the time I was 20. There was a separation between the inner richness and what I knew how to express interpersonally. It took many years to learn to communicate even a little. I was so lonely. I felt communion [when I was] surfing and being by the ocean and under the ocean. I felt communion when I was teaching meditation. But the rest of the time, I was just very alone because there was nobody talking like the way that I felt inside.

TS: Well, we could say that you took your own advice to heart here—developing expression commensurate with your communion in your own writing of this creative, inspiring, luscious, beautiful, delightful version of The Radiance Sutras.

LR: You know, it’s so funny. [Laughs.] Sometimes, I want to talk to another writer about this, because I feel like the text is its own living thing—like I showed up and it wrote itself through me. I mean, I was there and I was sober at four in the morning and all day. So there’s no altered state. It was just the work.

But it does feel like it’s its own thing and it’s been born. Maybe parents feel this way with their children—like, ‘They just came through me. That person came from God and now they’re out there running around in the world.’

It’s almost like—I want to say—I take no responsibility for the beauty. It’s like it sang itself into existence. But I don’t know if writers are allowed to say that. [Laughs.]

TS: Well, Lorin, let’s end by hearing one final verse. You mentioned to me that the most common place for people to keep a copy of The Radiance Sutras is either by their yoga mat or by their bedside. That makes good sense. That’s certainly where I would keep a copy.

But read one final bedside, yoga-mat-side Radiance Sutra for us.

LR: Oh, OK. Well, let’s do ‘26,’which is so adorable:

‘The One Who Is at Play Everywhere says,

There is a space in the heart where everything meets.
Come here if you want to find me.
Mind, senses, soul, eternity—all are here.
Are you here?

Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart.
Listen to the song that is always resonating.
Give yourself to it with total abandon.
Quiet ecstasy is here,
And a steady, regal sense
Of resting in perfect spot.
You who are the embodiment of blessing,
Once you know the way,
The nature of attention will call you to return.
Again and again, Answer that call,
And be saturated with knowing,
‘I belong here. I am at home.’’

TS: That’s beautiful. Brings up for me one final point I’d love for you to comment on. Which is: in a section towards the back of The Radiance Sutras, you talk about how, in working with meditation students, one of the things you discovered is how radiance is actually our real meditation teacher. Our own radiance. Tell me what you mean by that.

LR: Hmm. ‘Our own radiance?’

TS: Yes.

LR: As a meditation teacher?

TS: Yes. Our own radiance as a real teacher.

LR: Hm. One thing I mean by that is that people glow when they click into their own natural practice. Everybody can see it. Some people feel it more than see it. Some people hear it. There’s an actual, tangible sense of illumination when people come into the presence of their own natural way of being.

It’s quite remarkable—in a workshop, everyone can see it. And it happens all the time. Often immediately.

So, it seems to me that that’s the teacher. When I’m teaching meditation, I’m the apprentice to that glow in the person—to the radiance of their own life-force teaching them and leading them. I’m the student and I’m following that radiance split-second by split-second as it moves.

So, I think that’s what I meant.

TS: I’m talking with Lorin Roche. Lorin has published with Sounds True a new book called The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight. A beautiful book to read out loud—to keep by your bed [and] by your yoga mat. An absolutely gorgeous way for the text—the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra—to come into language in our contemporary world.

Lorin, thank you for all of those early mornings and your devotion to what I’m now calling ‘the VBT.’It takes a while to say it—the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. Thank you for your devotion to the VBT.

LR: Thank you, Tami. What a pleasure. And thank you for having the courage to go there.

TS: Oh, yes. We’re going there.

SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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