Teachings Article
Dissolving Differences
By Gurudevi Nirmalananda
September 2025
At the beach, I revel in watching the waves rolling onto the shore. Each has its own personality. One wave is taller but another is wider. One wave washes farther up the shore. Another gets swallowed up by one coming from behind. Yet they are all made of the same ocean water. They are all the same while they are all different.
Like this, Shiva is being everything in the universe. Every individual and every single thing is different from the others, yet all are made of Shiva. Shiva is having a glorious time being multifaceted, like a bride wearing three different wedding gowns at her wedding events. We love the play of the differences!
While Shiva is having a good time being you, you might not be enjoying it quite so much. Your focus on differences creates a “pushmi-pullyu” effect. Simply look at a serving platter full of cupcakes. You can get caught up in which of them will be most to your liking. But if someone beats you to it, you might have a few words to say or maybe a plan for payback. Unfortunately, things can escalate, even get out of control quickly.
Yoga says, “Look within. Find your own essence — see the One Divine Reality hidden in all.” Then you delight in the superficial differences. Your experience is like turning the wheel on a kaleidoscope, getting ever changing colors tumbling in the unchanging ray of light. And you get to eat your cupcake.
One way to work on your inner deepening is based on a sophisticated understanding of how energy becomes matter, including the physical matter of your own body. You delve into your own experiences, exploring the cosmic process in reverse. You expand your awareness in a meticulously step-by-step process.
Sharire samhara kalanam — Shiva Sutras 3.4
Dissolve the tattvas, each into the preceding, to realize the highest tattva, Shiva.
An easy example is vision. While you are seeing an object right now, perhaps words on a page, this is because you have the ability to see. This capacity of seeing is more subtle than any single object upon which you gaze. In this awareness, you have now expanded inward, dissolving from a single visual into your capacity for seeing. Each of these levels is a tattva (principle of Consciousness).
Delving into your ability to see, you realize that it is merely one type of perception, utilizing only one specific sensory capacity. Perception itself is greater than any single sensory pathway. Exploring into perception itself, you encounter your mind. This is a more subtle and more powerful tattva than the ones you have already found.
Now you contemplate how your mind brings in the many perceptions, analyzes them and chooses which you gauge as important while rejecting others. You use this to construct your sense of uniqueness, being different from others. However, yoga’s goal is to dissolve the differences.
Your mind builds castles and dungeons, placing you in them. Yet every thought is made of Shiva. Delving deeper, seeing your mind’s ongoing process, consider who is the “you” that is watching your own mind. You are not your mind. You have a mind, but you are the one who has a mind, oh Shiva.
In this way, you dissolve the tattvas, level by level, all the way back to Shiva, the source and substance of all. You discover that you are Shiva and have always been. And so is everyone and everything else, just like all the waves in the ocean are made of water.
This process is likened to peeling an onion, an oft-used analogy about getting enlightened. Each layer you peel off exposes another. As you continue inward, you find that the center of the onion is empty. Buddhists use this to explain that the ultimate reality is nothingness. However, yogis see something more — the space in the center is an entry point into infinity, the infinity of your own Divinity.
The inner experience of your Beingness changes everything. You are filled from the inside, feeling validated by your own is-ness. This frees you from the old sense of separation and difference. It is Shaktipat that gives you this inner opening, awakening your Divine Essence to arise within you. Yet still, you will have to peel the layers.
Why? Because your mind gets stuck in stuff. It loves repetitive patterns, working hard to keep them going. You can live your whole life being “stuck in a rut.” The good news is that Consciousness, arising within, will ultimately dissolve your rut. The bad news is that it can take quite a while, perhaps lifetimes. For more immediate results, you do some work on the layers yourself — to expose the Divine Essence within.
You may have already begun the process. Many of our tantric practices dissolve the tattvas for you. Meditation and mantra are the most powerful. Simply do 5 minutes of mantra and notice how it shifts you. It shifts how you feel as well as “who” you feel yourself to be.
You’ve also been dissolving the tattvas each time you experience the Guided Awareness in Shavasana. And each time you do Ujjayi Pranayama. Plus each time you look at or speak to a photo of our Gurus, an inner opening is assured. Pay attention, as they may answer back!
Tantra is a mystical path that invokes magical experiences — experiences that have no worldly explanation, but are reliable and profound. This stuff works because it draws on the mystery hidden within, your inherent Divinity. When you call on God, magical and mystical things happen.
Yet the whole point is your inner deepening. People often call on God when they want a change in their life. Yes, sometimes life will body-slam you into your stuff. The spiritual part of such events is about you drawing on your inner resources to get through. It’s not about energetically manipulating the world to get what you want. In fact, yoga specifically and repeatedly warns against this.
This means that your spiritual practices are not about protecting you from life’s crises. If they were, then they wouldn’t actually be spiritual. “Spiritual” means you draw on “spirit,” which is your own Divine Essence. Supported from the inside, you can face anything and love everyone, even while sailing through stormy seas. Find your way inside, especially in the midst of difficulties.
The point of the practices I have named is for you to root deeply within. You don’t have to identify the layers that clear away, you don’t have to name or understand them. It is like when you walk in your own front door, it doesn’t matter if it was raining or snowing outside — you are home. You come home to your own Self.
Yoga has always prioritized your deep and profound experiences. The earliest descriptions of the tattvas are in the Vedic and Upanishadic texts, dating from 1,000 BCE. Your inner experiences dissolve the layers automatically, freeing you from stuff you didn’t know you had. It’s an energetic process, where you are enlivened and energized by Consciousness-Itself.
About 500 CE, the Buddhist meditative practices began emphasizing a more psychological approach. The Buddha said, in order to be free, you had to remember every experience you ever had, in all the lifetimes you ever lived. Based on the model of peeling the layers, it sounds a bit daunting to me.
Yoga makes it easier. Instead of psychology, working your way through your mind and emotions, yoga focuses on an energetic upliftment. Shaktipat gives you the inner boost, then mantra repetition invokes the energy of Consciousness to arise within and dissolve the layers for you. Understanding the tattvas makes you able to recognize what level of inner expansion you are exploring.
The practice of dissolving the tattvas, as described in the sutra above, is done in a contemplation. This is not during meditation. Technically, you are doing a bhavana, a way of feeling into your own deeper levels. It’s like you’re going into a room where the lights are out, so you move slowly and feel your way around. But someone has told you that there’s a couch and a side table with a lamp on it, so you know what you’re looking for.
You can use any of your sensory capacities as a starting point. Any sound you hear indicates you have the power of hearing, which you can track inward as a perception. As you wind through the inner levels, you expand with each one, transforming your mind along the way.