In the Tantrik view, each individual is indeed considered a complete expression of the energy of Consciousness. This perspective is rooted in the fundamental non-dual philosophy of Tantra, which sees the entire universe, including all beings, as manifestations of a singular, all-encompassing Consciousness.
Tantra teaches that pure Consciousness, often referred to as Shiva, is the ultimate reality. This Consciousness is not separate from its creative power or energy, known as Shakti[1]. In this view, every being and object in the universe is a unique expression of this Consciousness-Energy dynamic.
The Tantrik tradition posits that there is an inherent impulse within Consciousness to know itself fully. This desire for self-recognition is not born out of lack or incompleteness, but rather from the playful nature of Consciousness itself[3]. It's akin to an artist who creates to express and experience their own creative potential.
In the human experience, this desire manifests as a spiritual quest or an innate longing for something greater. Tantra offers various practices and perspectives to facilitate this awakening:
Expansion of Awareness: Through meditation and other practices, Tantra aims to expand individual consciousness beyond its limited ego-based perception[1].
Integration of Opposites: Tantra teaches the harmonization of seemingly opposite forces within oneself, such as masculine and feminine energies[1].
Embracing All Experiences: Unlike some spiritual paths that advocate renunciation, Tantra encourages practitioners to embrace all aspects of life as potential gateways to awakening[4].
Energy Work: Practices like kundalini yoga are designed to awaken and channel the dormant spiritual energy within the body[1].
The ultimate aim in Tantra is not to become something other than what we already are, but to recognize our true nature as expressions of divine Consciousness. This recognition, often termed as "pratyabhijna" in Kashmir Shaivism (a prominent school of Tantra), is considered the highest form of spiritual realization[3].
This perspective has profound implications for how we approach spiritual practice and daily life:
In essence, the Tantrik view invites us to see ourselves and the world around us as perfect expressions of Consciousness, each playing a unique role in the cosmic dance of self-discovery and awakening.
Citations: [1] https://theyogalunchbox.co.nz/tantra-a-system-for-mind-expansion/ [2] https://yogainternational.com/article/view/tantra-and-the-teachings-of-abhinavagupta [3] https://www.embodiedphilosophy.com/the-light-of-consciousness-the-core-of-tantrik-spiritual-philosophy-2/ [4] https://elevatecalm.com/what-is-tantra/ [5] https://hridaya-yoga.com/tantra-yoga-the-yoga-of-integrating-consciousness-and-energy/ [6] https://www.theauminstitute.com/blog/what-is-tantra-a-deeper-dive-into-the-true-meaning-and-practice [7] https://www.bigshakti.com/tantra-the-science-of-self-transformation-and-self-realization [8] https://www.vimarshafoundation.org/post/understanding-the-meaning-of-tantra-a-journey-into-spiritual-liberation
There is an innate desire within Consciousness to wake up to itself. To know itself as it truly is.
In the Tantrik View, each of us is a complete expression of the energy of Consciousness. Each of us is a pertect movement in its endless dance of self-exploration, self-realization, and self-love. Let us then celebrate the fact that the opportunity has been given us to become aware of what we are.
Our awakening to our true nature is integral to the energy of life and instrumental to its unfolding. Whether you can sense it right now or not, you long to awaken to your total being, and by so doing, to fall in love with the whole of reality, which is nothing but an expression of your own Self.
You are the one Divine Consciousness made flesh. Your task is simply to become aware of this miracle, this fundamental fact of your being. Life has created a form by which it may know itself, and that form is you. Take this statement in; absorb it in its fullness. Become aware that the disparate currents of energy in your being - what you call thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, perceptions - are all simply vibrations of energy, flowing within a field of awareness. You are awareness, and you are the vibrating patterns of energy that manifest within it.
Awareness and energy entwined in perfect union: that's all that is ever happening, and that's all that 'you' are.
Once you become aware of the true nature of reality, everything you do becomes an act of reverence. Simply living your ordinary daily life with full awareness becomes a complete practice of meditation, a perfect form of worship, an offering to all beings and to Being itself. Tantra teaches that because there is only One in the universe, all actions are in truth the Divine exploring itself, reverencing itself, worshiping itself.
Needless to say, not all actions seem like an expression of the Divine to the conditioned mind. This is because we do not comprehend the Five Acts that constitute a central teaching of the text that follows.
Consciousness not only creates, sustains, and dissolves the worlds of its experience, but also conceals itself from itself as well as reveals itself to itself once again.
The core conflict in our spiritual journey lies in the profound urge to transform ourselves and the equally compelling need to embrace and love ourselves just as we are.
These two vectors of the spiritual life seem to be at odds, don't they? It appears that you could do one but not both. You could either change, or you could honor yourself exactly as you are at this moment. The paradox is that we are apparently being asked to do both. Simultaneously. The Tantrik tradition makes a careful exploration of this dilemma and comes to an insightful conclusion.
The tradition tells us that when you open to the possibility of honoring yourself exactly as you are at every moment, that attitudinal stance necessarily includes honoring your transformation, because you are not a static entity! Truly accepting yourself as you are clearly encompasses accepting change.
But what kind of change? With self-acceptance, you no longer seek to force change upon yourself out of a sense of not being good enough; rather, the change and growth of which we speak is simply what naturally wants to happen. In other words, accepting yourself includes accepting whatever Life most naturally wants to do through you, moment to moment. The tradition also suggests that the process by which Consciousness awakens to itself through you is inevitable and that everyone is involved in this process of self-discovery. If you think about it, this claim is quite startling. Not only is there in truth only one spiritual path, dressed up in different cultural costumes, but everyone is on that path. There's only one game in town, and every- body's a part of it, even if they don't know it yet. This game is the process by which life comes to fully know and love and cele- brate the whole of itself. Some people, of course, don't know they're on the path. Either they are still accumulating enough pleasure to realize that ac- cumulated pleasure doesn't lead to fulfillment, or they are still in the process of accumulating enough suffering to motivate themselves to seek a different paradigm. Once you have accumulated a certain amount of suffering (or pleasure, for that matter), something inside you says, This is just not working. At this point an opening occurs deep inside (which the tradition calls saktipa- ta), and what emerges a willingness to approach life in a way you never before sensed clearly, except perhaps inchoately and fleetingly, as a child. And no matter what you think you know about life, once this opening takes place, whatever you thought you knew has run its course. Something else begins, and continues to unfold. Some arrive at this point by living the dream of whomever they feel they are supposed to be-right up to the moment when everything they do seems forced, hollow, or somehow pointless. Some arrive at this point by rebelling against society until that doesn't work either. Others may go back and forth between trying to live up to something and trying to tear everything apart. The great Tantrik master Abhinava Gupta, the guru of the author of our text, taught that deep inside your being, at some point there is a turn, an opening, an expansion. It's subtle at first; it may take the conscious mind months, or even years, to comprehend that this turn has taken place-though if the turn is a sharp one, usually you will become aware of it within a year. turn toward what? you might ask. With this turn, you may find yourself thinking things like, There must be more than this. I don't know what this life is about. I don't know what I am supposed to be doing. But I know that no one else really knows either, however much they pretend otherwise. It's like everyone's playing a game without being sure of the rules and without knowing how to win. Realizing the truth of not knowing gives rise to a longing that you experience more deeply, perhaps even more painfully, than you ever experienced the desire to live up to the programmed standards that were set for your life. The programming ceases to matter much anymore. Now, you experience an openness, a willingness, a humility, and a coming to the path. Before you embark on the spiritual path per se, you may see the world as a big scary place where everyone is trying to perse- cute you, or you may see it as a game in which you're striving to win a huge prize. Or both. Either way, once you come to the path, you see through your fruitless attempts to be 'safe' or to 'succeed', and a deeper awareness arises-there's something else going on. Something utterly beyond my programming, and yet much more real. I want to know what that is. This initial spiritual opening is often accompanied with immaturity-such as harsh judgments of your previous way of life, of the way others are living, of family and friends who are still 'sleepwalking', and of yourself whenever you fall back into your old ways, as you must at times do. The harshness comes up because in the beginning you haven't yet softened into compassion, in true self-acceptance, which is the maturation of your awakening. In our immature stage we say, I have to do this spiritual work; I have to make myself one with God, and, further, The people I know should to do it, too. My partner should be doing it. I can't even talk with someone who's not doing this. At this point in our spiritual work, nothing very deep can happen for us yet. We have made ourselves the agents of our own transformation, taken on respon- sibility for something that we don't really know how to do, something that doesn't need to be 'done' but rather needs to be al- lowed, served, facilitated. In the language. yoga, when you make yourself the doer that must act on and forcibly manipulate re- ality (whether that 'reality' is your mind, your body, or your life situation), no real transformation can take place. Eventually, our immaturity gives way to a stage in which we're willing to embrace the whole of our being and allow a natural process to unfold. Now, real transformation can happen. Now we get out of our own way and surrender our mental images of the spiritual life to the inner intuitive power known as kuṇḍalini. Probably the most precise definition of Kundalini Shakti is the innate intelligence of embodied Consciousness. In spiritual work, the true task of the mind is to get out of the way so that the innate intelligence, kundalini, can work through the body-mind unim- peded. This is particularly challenging for those who think they are the body-mind, which is nearly everyone. We look at the shape of our body and the contents Four mind-the thoughts, the beliefs, the feelings-and we have the notion that this de- fines who and what we are. This conviction is so deep that it's not even in our conscious awareness. It is challenging, to say the least, for a mind conditioned to believe in its own centrality to accept the invitation to get out of the way. Wake up to the truth that what you think and believe is not that important, and it doesn't define you. It doesn't point toward reality, because reality is nonverbal and nonconceptual. So you cannot look at the contents of the mind to discover who you are. If you explore your mind, your only discovery will be what you have been conditioned to believe. The mind is, prior to awakening, just an organ that regurgitates conditioning. Subsequent to the onset of awakening, little by little the mind can become a servant of the awakening process. Not so much through embracing new beliefs (which is just trading old concepts for new ones), but more through the power of its attention. What you choose to pay attention to can, over time, radically alter your experience of reality more than anything else. A Gentle Lean into Loving Awareness The Tantrik tradition offers us an option that makes the whole spiritual path gel into coherence: the gentle effort of leaning into a loving awareness of what is. This means using the power of the will, gently but persistently, to open into nonjudgmental inti- macy with whatever is happening in this moment. For example, let's say you're meditating on the breath. Ask yourself: What is the minimum effort I can expend to be fully present with the movement of my breath? I phrase it this way because being in real presence requires softening into what is, opening to it, becoming intimate with it, until there's no 'it' separate from 'you'. Working with the breath in this way is good practice for more challenging forms of presence. Let's say you're experiencing emotion. Ask yourself: Can I relax into intimacy with what is right now, and let it all the way in, even if it's painful at first? For this to work, you must soften into intimacy with the raw feeling rather than your story about the feeling. (Notice how this Tantrik approach is markedly different from what we learn in other forms of yoga.) Almost any spiritual practice can be performed with this sort of loving awareness, this curious exploration. Anything from yoga postures to meditation to exploring your feelings to walking down the street can become motivated by a sense of wonder, and therefore become part of this process of deeper inquiry into what is. This process, when it's working, is not motivated by the de- sire to become different from how you are or a 'better person'. You're just following the natural flow of awareness becoming more intimate with itself. And that, as it happens, tends to make you more present, more compassionate, more curious, and more caring, and most people happen to call that being a 'better person'. Once begun, you cannot stop this process of self-discovery. It's a natural part of your being. But you can definitely slow it way down, if you feed habitual thought patterns and unconscious behavior patterns. This process can take a very long time or happen fairly quickly, depending in part on your ability to be gentle with yourself yet absolutely relentless and persistent with your inquiry. Self-Acceptance and Unconditional Love for What Is Loving your own being; fully accepting yourself; accepting what Life wants to do through you; releasing your ambition to trans- form yourself into someone or something else, some imagined ideal; and, at the same time, fully allowing and making space for your natural process of transformation to unfold-this is the heart of the spiritual life. Be aware that this gentle yet persistent lean into your natural unfolding process is not going to take you somewhere, other than deeper into yourself, or get you something, other than self-awareness. All striving to obtain or acquire-whether we're talk- ing about spiritual experiences, dramatic realizations, money, or power, it's all the same-only moves you around on the horizon- tal plane. There is no paradigm shift. With this gentler Way I've been talking about, you are moving in the vertical plane: deepen- ing your sense of the real. This is the goal of Tantra: we seek to pierce through and break out of our mental conditioning-like a new butterfly breaks free of the cocoon of its long slumber-and live day by day, even moment to moment, from the deepest place in our being: from Being itself. No words can begin to describe the subtle glory, the beauty, and the quiet joy of living that way. It's a state i which nothing need be added or subtracted. It's like you're gently riding the crest of a wave and can surrender into its flow, and it brings you to anything you need, and bears away what you don't. The ocean offers a perfect metaphor for this paradigm shift. The ocean is a hugely complex system of fluid dynamics, con- stantly moving. Sometimes the tide is in; sometimes it's out; sometimes the waves are high; sometimes they're low. Whatever the configuration, there is a pattern: the waves come minute by minute, cresting, breaking, and then folding back to return to the sea. This unceasing movement is like a single complex Pattern, and it's all a part of the same whole. You don't pick and choose a favorite section of a wave and try to hang on to it, do you? It's like that in the awakened life. Once you sense the pattern of life's energy, its flux, how it endlessly ebbs and flows, how could you continue with your picking-and-choosing strategy, or your man- aging-and-controlling strategy? You can't, and you wouldn't want to. The whole of life is revealed as beauty and rhythm and a thrilling energy and opening to it, surrendering to and aligning with its ceaseless movement, brings both joy and peace. Joy and peace in boredom, in grief, and in desolation, as well as in happiness. Joy in the dance of the Pattern, and peace in forever releas- ing resistance to it. That is the peace that passeth understanding. But we cannot come to abide in that paradigm without support. For this process to work, we need powerful teachings that are precisely articulated, that we can contemplate, that are durable, that don't fall apart when we use them in intensely and chal- lenging personal inquiry. Such teachings have the power to destabilize the deep-seated programming that doesn't allow us to ex- perience things the way they really are. Once they have done that work, the teachings can dissolve. We don't need to hang on to them.
Let the teachings you are about to encounter be the 'acid bath' to dissolve the calcified structures of your identity and your conditioned ideas about reality. Let them create porosity, movement, and flow.
Let them open you to wonder. Take the sutras deep inside and let them marinate; let them work with- in you. Come at them from every angle. Hold them up to your own experience. Explore the feelings, the textures, the colors, and the flavors of the teachings. Ask yourself again and again, What would it be like if I directly realized the truth of this teaching? What might it feel like to abide in the wordless place this teaching arose from? Here is one possible sacred intention (sankalpa) for reading this book and absorbing its teachings and practices. You can of course compose your own as well. Sankalpa In the days ahead I'll allow myself to feel into the deepest, purest yearnings of my heart. I will allow those yearnings to bring me into spaces of stillness; spaces of gentle, wordless inquiry; and spaces of opening to whatever lies within. And I further resolve to explore, with loving awareness, whatever I discover within myself until it integrates and shines as one with the light of my innate being. I will not fear. I will not shy away from that light, whether gloriously or painfully bright. Inspired by the teachings of the scripture, I'll look inside and welcome what I see, opening ever deeper day after day, with gentle effort, with sweet effort, allowing the spir- itual unfolding that wants to happen and is ready to occur.