Loving the World
Monday, March 27th, 2006Paramahamsa Satyananda Saraswati has written that we have to love this world. Yet, many, if not most people who enter into spiritual practice are looking for escape or salvation from the world. And many spiritual traditions promise us these very fruits.
When we reflect on the necessity of loving this world from the View of Tantra, we have to relinquish the notion that we love the world as a favor to the world, or as some feat of compassion. Or that this love is limited or conditioned in any way.
Consider that love and compassion are not the same thing. The love we might discover for the world is more akin to aesthetic wonder, or the love of the world Self for its own creations. Anyone who paints or writes, or creates other kinds of works of art, has experienced the mysterious love that arises for what you have made out of your own self and caused to appear as distinct. This is analogous to the love that arises for the world.
This love arises along with a great intimacy. A cosmos that is unimaginably vast becomes an intimate cohort of co-arising creations.
There are no special processes manifesting one aspect of life as opposed to another. There is only one process of creation, and all diverse appearances arise and subside endlessly through this process. Anything we might call transcendence is simply a mode of appearing of this one, entire, all-encompassing process.
Buddhist traditions often talk about impermanence. Impermanence is another way of indicating the world’s liveliness. Death is also this expression of the essential liveliness of creation. There is nothing absolutely static to oppose to impermanence or liveliness. Only the entire process is uninterrupted. The cosmic process is uninterruptedly “abuzz.” Even considering states of cessation, in retrospect, something moves.
Or, as my Daoist friend says, “there is always a wiggle.”
As we discover our intimacy with the entire life process, with the liveliness of the creation, we begin to truly appreciate its variety: its textures, smells, sounds, sights, and gestures. In the same way that true lovers love the differences between one and another, the discovery of intimacy or nondifference is the birth of a true appreciation of diversity.
When we discover our love for the world, all of it, without exception, there is no longer anything to escape, transcend, or from which to be saved.
This is why Tantra is a practice of everyday life. We may feel attachment and attraction to what we think are “special” powers, and we may long for a world transfigured by magic. But when we don’t love the entire world process, when we hanker for only the so-called extraordinary, we lose contact with the enduring magic to be found in the quiet, loving appreciation of the everyday processes of this everywhere extraordinary-ordinary creation.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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