Tantra Means Continuity
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007Tantra means continuity, communication, and comprehension.
We discover we are in a state of continuity. We are nothing but an expression of continuity.
We expand our sense of self and communicate with greater sensitivity and awareness. We are nothing but communication, or expressivity arising a state of continuity.
We comprehend ourselves as comprehensive. We are without beginning and without end, without birth and without dying.
First, we discover greater embodied awareness of continuity. We use ritual, mantra, yoga, and so on to begin to erode our sense of separateness.
Second, as our sense of separateness begins to erode, we begin to notice that we exist in a total conversation, a total communication.
If someone feels isolated and alone, or has developed an isolating self-narration about being different from others, this manifests as both a feeling and an insistence that “no one understands me.” It manifests as a blockage in communication.
If we begin to experience more of our continuity and connection with life, simultaneously, our ability to communicate and be communicated to expands. Slowly, over time, we are able to understand the language of the world. Everything is speaking. Everything is listening and responding, without exception.
When we are only a little adept at noticing this total world communication, we remark on “coincidences.” Or perhaps we use a concept of world communication to make up new age type fantasies before we are actually able to perceive and receive such communications for real. Although we may be in a state of egoic wishful thinking, fundamentally, everything is a form of expression. We are on the right track. We just have to take off our rose-colored glasses!
Third, we comprehend ourselves as comprehensive. Each individual experiencing is a point of View, or a perspective, of the whole. We comprehend ourselves as simultaneously comprehensive and as a unique perspective.
The beauty of our world is that our perspective, our unique individual experiencing, is Reality, is Shiva nature. We can discover everything by investigating our lived situation. We do not need to construct or invent or imagine anything else “better” or more “holy.” All of Reality is expressing itself in us, right here and right now. Shiva nature, or Reality, makes itself available to us in every moment.
This is the crux of Tantrik View.
When we have embodied the recognition that each person we meet is another point of view, another expression of one, continuous Reality, great intimacy, interest, and compassion arises.
As we relax our sense of self, the world becomes both larger and smaller. The infinity of life’s expressions is simply unthinkable. At the same time, all of those expressions are our intimates, our own Self. So everything is also closer, more familiar.
We develop interest in the multitude of life’s expressions when we relax self-interest. We become interested in Self. This is disinterested interest. We are no longer trying to get anything for small self. We are no longer clinging, hoarding, and defending. We express natural curiousity and interest. How freeing! Try to imagine it.
Compassion, too, arises, as we become exquisitely sensitive to the degrees of freedom and nonfreedom that are expressed in ourselves and those around us.
To experience awareness as unfolding in these ways, in such stages, is also a point of View. But there is nothing to dismiss or belittle or renounce. All of this is Shiva nature. We can relax and enjoy.
In Matriseva,
Shambhavi
Firefly Multimedia