Tantrika

Ananda said to the Master, “Half of the holy life, O Lord, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful.”
“It is not so, Ananda, it is not so,” said the Buddha, “It is not half of the holy life; it is the whole of the holy life.”

Samyutta Nikaya (V.2)

To be in the flesh,
To act,
But to transform flesh and action
Into spirit, into evolution,
That is the mystery, the vocation.
Not to renounce,
Not to withdraw,
Not to shrink from life,
But to open and embrace and accept
Every desire, every situation,
And offer it up as prayer.
Not to discover the unknown
But to know the known.
The Sanskrit root tan
Means to expand:
Through science and experiment
To open the mind.

Looking at a terracotta figurine from Harappa,
I recognize a yogic asana:
How ancient and primeval
Is this wisdom, this science,
Already there
At the source of civilisation.

Shiva-Shakti,
Purusha-Prakriti,
To make the two one.
Shakti mounted upon her lover,
Enthroned on the corpse of Shiva,
Closing the circuit,
Resurrecting him.

Woman,
Kinetic energy of the cosmos,
From you the world is born
And into you is dissolved.
Do you laugh to be called a goddess?
But you are.
Prime mover,
Womb of the world,
Eternal virgin,
Smiling hermaphrodite,
Universal yantra,
Substance of all.
To me you are infinite joy,
The liberator,
The queen.
I anoint you
And charge you
With mantras and mudras,
I become the poem,
The music,
The world.

Sattva:
Centripetal ascending,
Cohering
Towards unity,
Towards liberation.
Rajas:
Revolving,
Creating.
Tamas:
Centrifugal descending,
Decomposing,
Annihilating.
When the three are unbalanced
This is evolution,
The ceaseless cycle,
The world created anew,
All the forces
Combining and recombining,
Projecting the universe
In waves
Until it all begins
To revert to equilibrium.
Tamas, rajas and sattva
In balance:
No motion,
No manifestation,
No flux,
Only stillness,
Perfect stillness.

10 billion brain cells,
Each connected with 25,000 others,
More connections
Than there are atoms in the universe;
100 billion sensations a second,
5,000 signals a second.
And I feel the planets attracting,
The earth revolving,
The seasons calibrating,
The elements colliding,
The deep vibrations.
I am inside and outside,
With and without,
Here and there
And everywhere,
This and that
And nothing.
Serpent of light, arise,
Spiral god arise,
And realize,
Energize.

I rise as I fall,
Cartesian diver of the stars.
Through pleasure
To bliss,
I cling to my lover,
Stripping her down to the bone,
Climbing out of my skin.
Electric animals,
Demon-angels in the dark,
We separate the subtle
From the gross.

A:
Creation,
U:
Preservation,
M:
Dissolution.

Brahmanda,
The egg,
Salagrama,
The globe,
Shiva-linga,
The phallus.

I should like to gather
From the bed of the Narmada River
A perfect Brahmanda,
A stone egg
Sculpted and polished
By the currents,
Auspicious to the mind’s touch.

Her body
Is the yantra,
(The Sri Yantra,
To be contemplated for a lifetime
Until you become the yantra,
The total revelation)
Composed of point, line, circle,
Triangle, square and lotus,
Juxtaposing, combining, intersecting,
Repeating again and again,
Space and time, sound and energy
Expanding from the first vibration
From the first desire.
She I make my study
In cymatics,
Waves, vortices, hexagons, rectangles,
Overlapping patterns.
And at the center
The bindu,
The ultimate point
Beyond which there is nothing,
The seed of the cosmos
Into which all is condensed.

OM HRIM PRTHIVYAI HUM PHAT

OM HRIM ADBHYAH HUM PHAT

OM HRIM TEJASE HUM PHAT

OM HRIM VAYAVE HUM PHAT

OM HRIM AKASAYA HUM PHAT

When the divine life-stuff
Is about to put forth the universe,
The cosmic waters
Grow a thousand-petalled lotus
Of pure gold
Radiant as the sun,
The mouth of the universal womb.

A painting from 18th century Rajasthan,
Gouache on paper:
Kali the destroyer stands on Rati and Kama, the naked lovers,
Who lie entwined beneath her feet,
Copulating in a bed of flames,
A giant lotus rising from the waves,
Their lovemaking the primordial desire
Which gives rise to all Creation;
About her neck Kali wears
A garland of human heads,
About her waist a girdle of hands
Signifying Karma,
She sticks out a crimson tongue
Signifying the kinetic force
Which gives rise to all actions;
In one of her four hands she wields a sacrificial sword
And in another a severed head,
Symbols of dissolution and annihilation
Directing the sadhaka to shed his ego.

All life, all breath, all thought, all motion,
Is Prana,
From a speck of protoplasm
To the mind of Brahma.