From: “Philosophies of India” by Heinrich Zimmer

Both the Tantra and the popular Hinduism accept the truth of Advaita Vedanta but shift the accent to the positive aspect of maya…… The world is the unending manifestation of the dynamic aspect of the divine, and as such not be devaluated and discarded as suffering and imperfection, but celebrated, penetrated by enlightened insight, and experienced with understanding.

The hair of the Goddess is dishevelled in her frantic, self-maddened dance which produces the image of samsara, but the perfect devotee is not thereby dismayed. “Though the mother beat him, ” says Ramprasad, “the child cries ‘Mother! O Mother!’ and clings still tighter to her garment.”

The Vedantic yogi never tires of stating that kaivalya, “isolation-integration”, can be attained only by turning away from the distracting allure of the world and whorshiping with single-pointed attention the formless Brahman-Atman; to the Tantric, however ” as to the normal child of the world ” this notion seems pathological, the wrong-headed effect of a certain malady of intellect. By the true lover of the Goddess, not merely seeking of liberation but also its attainment is not desired. For what is the use of salvation if it means absorption?

“I like eating sugar,” as Ramprasad said, “but I have no desire to become sugar”.

Let those who suffer from the toils of samsara seek release: the perfect devotee does not suffer; for he con both visualize and experience life and the universe as the revelation of that Supreme Divine Force (sakti) with which he is in love, the all-comprehensive Divine Being in its cosmic aspect of playful, aimless display (lila) ” which precipitates pain as well as joy, but in its bliss transcends them both. He is filled with the holy madness of that “ecstatic love” (prem) which transmutes the world.

This very world is a mansion of mirth; Here I can eat, here drink and make merry. Artha (prosperity), kama (the fulfillment of sensual desires), dharma (the enactment of the religious and moral rituals of everyday life, with an acceptance of the burden of all the duties), and moksa (release from it all) are one. The polarity of moksa and the trivarga is transcended and dissolved not in introverted realization alone, but in living feeling as well. By virtue of his talent of love for the merciful Goddess, the true devotee discovers that the fourfould fruit of artha, kama, dharma, and moksha falls into the palm of his hand.

Come let us go for a walk, O mind, to Kali, the Wish-fulfilling Tree,” wrote Ramprasad; “And there beneath It gather the four fruits of life”. “The mind ever seeks the Dark Beautiful One, ” he states. “Do as you wish. Who wants Nirvana?”

It is an essential principle of the Tantric idea that man, in general, must rise through and by means of nature, not by the rejection of nature. “As one falls to the ground,” the Kularnava Tantra states, “so one must lift oneself by the aid of the ground “. The pleasure of love, the pleasure of human feeling, is the bliss of the Goddess in her world productive dance, the bliss of Siva and Sakti in their eternal realization of identity; only as known in the mode of inferior ego-consciousness. The creature of passion has only to wash away his sense of ego, and then the same act that formerly was an obstruction becomes the tide that bears him to the realization of the absolute as bliss (ananda). The nondual celebration of the world as Brahman embraces the Lord’s transcendent repose and does not omit the detail of His mystery play (lila) of continous creation.

A right method cannot exclude the body; for the body is devata, the visible form of Brahman as jiva. “The Sadhaka (Tantric student) “, writes Sir John Woodroffe, “is taught not to think that we are one with the Divine in Liberation only, but here and now, in every act we do. For in truth all such is Sakti. It is Siva who as Sß¡kti is acting in and through the Sadhaka……When this is realized in every natural function, then, each exercise thereof ceases to be a mere animal act and becomes a rite ” a Yajna. Every function is a part of the Divine Action (sß¡kti) in Nature. “

The goal of the Tantric Sadhaka is to incorporate the excluded forces as well as those accepted generally and experience by this means the essential nonexistence of the antagonistic polarity ” its vanishing away, its nirvana; i.e., the intrinsic purity and innocence of the seemingly dark and dangerous sphere. In this way he breaks within himself the tension of the “forbidden”, and resolves everything in light; recognizing in everything the one sß¡kti which is the general support of the world, macrocosmic as well as microcosmic, the mother of the gods and elves, the weaver of the moon-dream of history. Therewith comes release from the world-illusion ” release through its full enjoyment or realization.

The highest gift of Kali, the dark and beautiful Goddess-Dancer of the Cremation Ground is release from illusion.

Hence the great Tantric formula (so different from that of th earlier Hindu yogic disciplines): yoga (the yoking of empirical consciousness to transcendental consciousness) and bhoga (“enjoyment”, the experience of life’s joy and suffering) are the same. Bhoga itself can be made a way of yoga. But it requires a hero (vira) to confront and assimilate, in perfect equanimity, the whole wonder of the World Creatrix – to make love, without hysterical reactions, to the Life force, which is the shakti of his own entirety.

Brahman, shakti, the force-substance of Indian nondual philosphy, is the principle that enters, pervades and animates the panorama and evolutions of nature, but as the same time is the animated and pervaded, entered field or matter of nature itself (natura naturans, prakrti); thus it both inhabits and is the manifested universe and all it forms. As the unceasing dynamism of the transitory sphere of becoming and withering away, it lives in all the changes of birth, growth, and dissolution. But, simultaneously, it is remote from this sphere of change; for in its quiescent, dormant, transcendent aspect it knows no phases and is detached from both the living and the dead. The names ascribed to it are concessions to the human mind. This mind however being itself of the essence of the unutterable, may be touched to Self-recollection by properly hearing on or another of the finally inadequate names. The name Brahman or Saccidananda is misleading for it suggests that the transcendent is. The name Sunyata, the Void, is misleading also for it suggests that the transcendent is not. Perhaps yet it is the better name for it does suggest transcendence, rather than definable existence.

What the Vedic sages had recognized in the heavens of the macrocosm, the Tantric adept felt dwelling bodily within himself, in the microcosm, and he named it, also, “God”. Hence whereas the members of the Brahman caste in Vedic times had conjured the holy power (brahman) by means of public sacrifices, the Tantric devotee by means of the simple, essentially personal rituals of the circles of Tantric initiates, sacrificed his own ego and thereby conjured the holy power (shakti) of his own phenomenality into manifestation in his life. The gods served by the Brahmans had been those of the community; the god worshiped by the Tantrist was his own, his ista-devata, his chosen beloved ” which yet was identical in essence with whatever deity was anywhere adored; for “It is only a fool, ” states the Sammohana Tantra, “who sees any difference between Rama and Sß­va.” “I am the Devi and none other, ” thinks the Tantric Devotee. “I am Brahman who is beyond all grief. I am a form of Saccidananda whose true nature is eternal Liberation.”

“The Mother is present in every house,” writes Ramprasad. “Need I break the news as one breaks an earthen pot on the floor?“

Aus: “Philosophies of India” by Heinrich Zimmer / edited by Joseph Campbell / Meridian Books

To all the gods within us ……

“NO ONE who is not himself divine may (successfully) worship the divinity.” 

The response of the Indian Civilization to the dictum ” All Is Brahman” was not solely the renunciation of the manifest for the unmanifest aspect of the metaphysical equation. The Tantric system renders a stupendous dionysian affirmation of the dynamism of the phenomenal spectacle, which at once affirms and transcends the apprehended traits of the individual and his cosmos. Prakrti herself (natura naturans, not the merely visible surface of things) is portrayed ” with no resistance to her charm ” as She gives birth to the oceans of the worlds. Individuals ” mere waves, mere moments, in the rapidly flowing, unending torrent of ephemeral forms ” are tangibly present; but their tangibility itself is simply a gesture, an affectionate flash of expression on the otherwise invisible countenance of the Goddess Mother whose play (lila) is the universe of her own beauty. In this dionysian vision the individual is at once devaluated and rendered divine, majestic with the majesty of nature herself and mystically sheltered in the very maelstrom of the world.