Winter night air
Freezing our breath
Bracing!
Ritual Fire
Breathing bright flames
Warming!
Icy-cold Water
Burbling soft sounds
Soothing!
Snow covered Earth
Sparkling with frost
Grounding!
Magic Full-Moon
Shining pale rays
Healing!
Five Faerie Hearts
Twinkling with joy
Dancing!
Silent Moonbow
Playing with Light
Enchanting!
Glamour is shaped
Poetry made
Transforming!
“Every Time I find the meaning of life-they change it”
This is the title of a book by Daniel Klien that caught my attention as I was browsing at Waterstone’s last week. It made me chuckle!
The thing is, that I might just have discovered the meaning of life, the universe and everything in a book I’m currently reading about the Philosophy, History and Practice of Tantra by the respected and remarkably lucid Sanskrit scholar Christopher Wallis.
Because Tantra is one of the few spiritual traditions which embraces sex and sexuality within its meditative practices, and because we live in a culture which generally sees spirituality as separate and somehow above sexuality, there is much confusion and misinformation about it all.
One friend said to me when I was considering paying for a Tantric massage “Come on- it’s not worth that! Its just a posh wank”. And a few days ago I was chatting with some friends one of whom is training as a Tantric Masseur and none of us could come up with a definition of what Tantra actually was.
So, brace yourself; here’s the central belief system from page 55 of Wallis’ book
“All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject the same plus a contracted locus of self awareness.
“This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. The unbounded Light of Consciousness contracts into finite embodied loci of awareness out of its own free will.
“When those finite subjects then identify with the limited and circumscribed cognitions and circumstances that make up this phase of their existence, instead of identifying with the trans-individual overarching pulsation of pure Awareness that is their true nature, they experience what they call “suffering”.
“To rectify this, some feel an inner urge to take up the path of spiritual gnosis and yogic practice, the purpose of which is to undermine their misidentification and directly reveal within the immediacy of awareness, the fact that the divine powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing and Acting comprise the totality of individual experience as well- thereby triggering a recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity, the Whole in every part.
“This experiential gnosis is repeated and reinforced through various means until it becomes the non-conceptual ground of every moment of experience, and one’s contracted sense of self and separation from the Whole is finally annihilated in the incandescent radiance of the complete expansion into perfect wholeness.
“Then one’s perception fully encompasses the reality of a universe dancing ecstatically in the animation of its completely perfect divinity.”
Wow-just wow!
