Play of Consciousness (Swami Muktananda)

The Perversion of Kashmir Shaivism

[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Play of Consciousness: A Spiritual Autobiography” by Swami Muktananda.]

Several days ago, I posted an Amazon review of Joey Lott’s book “You’re Trying Too Hard,” and in my review I poked fun at Lott’s purported spiritual experience of the “Blue Pearl.” Lott’s mention of the Blue Pearl, a sought-after visual experience by followers of the late Swami Muktananada, inspired me to write a review of Muktananda’s text “The Play of Consciousness,” which I read more than forty years ago.

When I read “The Play of Consciousness,” the fact that Muktananda was a Kashmir Shaivism guru was meaningless to me, but I did know that the idea of a “Blue Pearl” as a reflection of Ultimate Reality was nonsense. Not one other spiritual guru or tradition that I had studied had mentioned it, and so I simply wrote Muktananda off as an unorthodox guru not worth any more of my time. In addition to elevating the Blue Pearl to “Holy Grail” status, Muktananda in the “The Play of Consciousness” simply describes one ascended Shakti-induced spiritual experience after another. When I compared this “spiritual materialism” to the radical teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Huang Po, I rejected it.

I didn’t think about Muktananda again until 1973, when I read “The Knee of Listening,” by Franklin Jones (later to become Bubba Free John, Da Free John, and then Adi Da Samraj). Interestingly enough, Jones not only had been a Muktananda devotee, but had edited “The Play of Consciousness.” The awakened Jones divorced himself from, and criticized, Muktananda’s Dharma, which was contrary to his own own of “radical understanding,” and so I didn’t think about Muktananda again until the 1990’s, when, thanks to a wonderful series of books on the subject published by the State University of New York, I became very interested in Kashmir Shaivism.

The Kashmir Shaivism texts—“The Philosophy of Sadhana,” “The Doctrine of Recognition,” “The Doctrine of Vibration,” “The Triadic Heart of Siva, “The Siva Sutras, and “Spanda Karikas,”— in conjunction with Tibetan Dzogchen texts and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Epistemology, enabled me to, finally, “put it all together” spiritually. None of the Kashmir Shaivism texts even mentioned the Blue Pearl; instead they all emphasized reception of Shaktipat, Divine Power; and this Spirit-full type of spirituality meshed with my vision of yoga. Moreover, in accordance with Ramana Maharshi and Adi Da (Franklin Jones), and in contradistinction to Muktananda, these texts identify the Heart (Hridayam) as the locus of Self-Realization.

“The Play of Consciousness” describes the various spiritual experiences that Muktananda experienced on his path to “Self-realization.” But Self-realization has nothing to do with experiencing the “Blue Pearl,” and everything to do with cutting the Heart-knot), located two digits to the right of the center of one’s chest. Consequently, unless you are interested in a “perversion of Kashmir Shaivism,” I do not recommend Muktananda’s “Play of Consciousness.”