HEN WE ENTER the world of Tantra, we may need to loosen some of our preconceptions about the nature of reality. We begin to inhabit a twilight world where the distinctions between the material and the symbolic are less defined. We discover that psyche and soma, the unconscious and matter, are in an intimate interrelationship. The tantric view of reality does not make such solid differentiation between them; they are simply two reflections of the same ultimate nature. In the West, we habitually make a clear distinction between spirit and matter, whereas, in the East, these two are not separated.
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We use many activities of our worldly life-television, work, relationships, or food-as an escape into unconsciousness. Even spiritual practices such as meditation can be used to avoid feelings, responsibilities, relationships, and even living fully in our bodies. We can drift into a detached, disconnected, but peaceful state that avoids reality and the deeper aspects of ourselves.Definite emergence is the willingness to abandon the habitual disposition of avoiding facing ourselves. It challenges the habit of letting ourselves sink into unconscious, anesthetized states of denial.
Meditation is not a soft, quiet, easy way to generate a peaceful dissociation from the trials of life. If this is our wish, then Tantra is not the path to follow. When practiced properly, Tantra will confront us with our emotional problems so we have the opportunity to grow through them. Therefore our first prerequisite is a willingness to face the challenge, and no longer seek refuge in habits that keep us unconscious. Definite emergence is not abandoning life, as renunciation might imply, but living it fully and consciously. Rather than running away from difficult times when we are challenged, we wake up to the situation and face what there is to learn.
Spiritual practice often brings to the surface aspects of ourselves that are extremely painful. We have a deep reservoir of emotional wounds and patterns that may be hard to accept in ourselves, and which we have consequently often ignored or denied. This forms a powerful “Shadow,” to use Jung’s term. As we begin to develop some aspects of tantric practice, these repressed emotions will be resurrected from the underworld of our psyche. This enables the energy bound up in them to then be addressed and potentially transformed. This can sometimes be an uncomfortable process, and it is important to accept and value ourselves even though we feel dreadful, or are frightened of or disgusted with what…
Bodhichitta is a profound openness that seeks to respond to otherswithout judgment or discrimination. It is a big heart that has the capacity to accept and value all living beings, holding them dear and precious. This is not a passive principle that wishes only that all beings may be happy. Rather, it is an active dynamic quality of intention, sometimes known as the “great will,” that will engage in a demanding journey to awaken for the welfare…
Our tendency to get caught in harmful egotistical needs and habits, whether conscious or unconscious, is rooted in ignorance, the fundamental cause of suffering. Ignorance in Buddhism is seen in two ways. One is the failure to understand the laws of karma, or cause and effect. The other is our misunderstanding of the nature of reality. This refers to a particular misconception of the nature of both the ego and phenomena;that is, the belief that they have inherent self-existence. Unless this misconception is rectified, the…
The distinction between the two levels of truth-relative and absolute-is fundamental to Buddhist understanding. Relative truth is the way in which phenomena appear to exist; ultimate…
We cling to the idea that objects are independent, permanent, solid, and reliable because they give the illusion of being so, and vet the way they actually exist is interdependent, transient, unstable, and empty of inherent…
The tantric path is based on the view that all relative appearances arise in dependence upon the consciousness that cognizes them; in other words, the world each of us…
On a more subtle level, we mistakenly believe that our world has intrinsic substance independent of consciousness. When we hold this view of reality, the world and its events and objects become separate and solid, and we lose sight of their interdependent, insubstantial, transitory nature. This misconception makes us turn relative phenomena into absolute or ultimate entities…
Our mind then acts as a powerful projector of reality, and yet we fail to recognize it. We solidify our projected reality and endlessly create a world…
The degree to whichwe suffer is generally the degree to which we are clinging to a…
When we go to the cinema, the projected play of images has a significant effect on how we feel, as if what we see were real. We respond as if the images had lives of their own rather than being fabricated illusions. Understanding emptiness on a subtle level is recognizing that the material world is like an illusion, a mirage, and that the mind that apprehends it is no more than a…
While the ego’s relative existence is necessarily an aspect of our normal life, when we explore this more deeply we begin to recognize that there is no self to be grasped at as true, or ultimately real. Rather than becoming caught in a tight, emotionally contracted sense of…
When we practice Tantra, the solidity of ego-identity must be softened to enable us to have a special relationship with the two levels of truth. The aim of practicing Tantra is to develop an awareness that lives on the threshold between relative appearance and ultimate nature. When we let go of believing relative appearances to be ultimately true we can begin to live on this threshold, realizing that all phenomena, including our ego identity, are mere appearances,…
Alongside these three principal foundations for the practice ofTantra, I would like to add one further ingredient: a trust in our innate potential for…
ORDER TO INTEGRATE the processes involved in practicing Tantra it is important to have a sound and stable identity. When water is poured into a clay pot that is cracked or has not been fired properly, the pot will not be able to contain the liquid. The water may eventually weaken and destroy the pot. In a similar way, the practice of Tantra requires a vessel that will remain stable and be able to contain…
Unless they have considerable experience of Western students, Eastern teachers are often unaware of how much emotional wounding we suffer. They usually assume we have well-established, strong egos, and speak of abandoning or surrendering the ego and its related self-oriented egotism as the root of misery in our lives. However, this teaching requires the…
Theobject of emptiness is not to negate the existence of the ego on a relative level, but to cut through ego-grasping (Tib. daeddin), which holds the ego to be a solid self-existent entity, an ultimate truth. When we erroneously negate the relative…
normally in a relative world, we need a stable sense of ego identity, a focus of awareness that cognizes, filters and understands the events of the day, both inner and outer. This enables even a highly evolved individual to say “I am eating,” “1 am sitting,” and so on. This “I” is a valid relative truth. Without it we can have severe psychological problems, and even go…
The ego has two dimensions, which for most of us are not differentiated. One is healthy; the…
Ego-identity gradually becomes overwhelmed by layer upon layer of emotionally held beliefs about the sense of “I” or “me.” These are often painful wounds that we cling to and believe to be real and solid. We become fearful for our safety, and feel we are bad, worthless, unlovable and so on. We cling to this core traumatized sense of “I” as absolute and permanent, and experience a powerful emotional feeling of “I” as bad, worthless, and so on. This is the emotional tone of ego-grasping which we instinctively cling to as though it were real…
The Dalai Lama once said that a bodhisattva-one who aspires to rescue all beings from the ocean of suffering through becoming a Buddha-must have a huge ego. He was, of course, joking, but his point was that even to contemplate becoming a bodhisattva requires a strongsense of personal identity. What the bodhisattva does not do is to cling to that identity as…
Rather than being able to integrate them, these liberated forces will make us increasingly disoriented and unable to maintain a normal, functional life, like a lightning rod…
However, anyone with a normal, healthy sense of self, and who is well grounded in life, can enter the practice of Tantra with little concern. Danger only arises when someone has the tendency to be ungrounded, caught in idealistic, fanciful notions of…
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They might become aware of their potential in a way they have never recognized previously. Disciples still captivated by the inspiration of their teacher often speak as if they have fallen in love, full of wonder and admiration. The teacher has opened their eyes, and they see him or her as fundamental to that experience. What empowers this experience is partly the…
Each of us has an innate inner wisdom that is for the most part unconscious. Access to this inner knowledge-wisdom may at first elude us, and be primarily experienced projected onto an outer teacher in whom we place our trust. This inner wisdom is our inner archetypal guru, which is constellated by projection upon an outer teacher. Jung first introduced to the West an understanding of the archetype of the wise man or wise woman as a personification of the Self in the aspect of a teacher or guide. When we have no inner relationship to this quality, there is no inner resource in which to trust. At such times the outer guru can be a vital guide, an oasis in the desert, but a guide who should be approached cautiously. The outer teacher becomes…
From my own experience, detailed knowledge and understanding of the performance of ritual practices is almost impossible to gather without the guidance of a teacher. An oral tradition ensures a degree of protection that prevents those ill-prepared being able to develop the practice. This may sound exclusive or restrictive, but it has preserved intact an…
In the tantric tradition the guru is understood on three levels known as “outer,” “inner,” and “secret.” Understanding these three is crucial to deepening the experience of the guru-disciple relationship. The outer guru is therefore partly the expression of an archetypal need for someone to embody the inner guru through projection, or what in psychotherapy is called “transference.” This is similar to the…
This is often cultivated within a practice of guru yoga, where the visualized guru is brought repeatedly into the heart so as to remind the disciple of this inner quality. The awakening of the inner guru gradually enables…
This manifests in greater individuality and autonomy, and a growing sense of inner authority that increases the capacity to trust the inner…
An individual can have deep insights into the nature of reality and still have human failings, a shadow that has not been fully eradicated.
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UNG WROTE that the psyche’s inner disposition is always to attempt to move towards the healthiest state in any given situation. He considered this to be an important function of the Self as the archetype of wholeness. The Self has a fundamental homoeostatic intention that will enable the individual to adjust and integrate life experiences in a way that always attempts to remain unified and whole. We may be unconscious of this capacity of the Self to maintain wholeness, but once awakened it becomes central to every aspect of life, giving it meaning and value.
Symptoms of dis-ease are the psyche’s way back towards wholeness. Symptoms become a source of chronic suffering only when they are stuck and cannot move through.If we refuse to listen to the body’s expression of dis-ease through symptoms, the voices of those symptoms will become louder until we take notice and change. Similarly, when we are out of relationship to the source of our potential wholeness, we consequently suffer psychological ill health. When we fail to respond to the psyche’s archetypal intent, “the gods become our diseases,” to use Jung’s phrase…
The deity in Tantra can be understood as a gateway or bridge between two aspects of reality. Buddhism has no concept of a creator God, as do theistic religions. The deity is not to be viewed as a god inthe sense of an entity that has an autonomous existence beyond human consciousness. Rather, the deity is a symbolic aspect of forces that arise on a threshold between two dimensions of reality, or two dimensions of awareness. In Buddhism we speak of ”…
In one who has fully awakened, the two spheres ofreality become the “wisdom truth body,” or dharmakaya, and the “manifestation body,” or nirmanakaya. The creative vitality that exists on this threshold is the realm of sambhogakaya, or “complete enjoyment…
For a normal person, remaining present on this threshold of awareness is very unlikely. Our minds are too preoccupied by gross dualistic conceptions, and…
From a Buddhist perspective, our everyday sense of consciousness is a state of blindness or ignorance (Tib. marippa; literally, “not-seeing”) that does not see clearly our true nature or the nature of reality. This ignorance reinforces the solidity of the ego, and actually separates us from direct experience of our Buddha nature. The significant shift in awareness made possible by Buddhist practice depends on the…
and Self become reflections of the same present awareness, and are nondual.This is something Jung would not…
Four levels of tantra are usually delineated: Action Tantra (kriyatantra); Performance Tantra (charyatantra); Yoga Tantra (yogatantra); and…
Our Western attitude tends to view consciousness as paramount, so that if we have conscious knowledge of what is going on, we feel safe and in control. This somewhat arrogant position does not see faith or trust as acceptable. The thought of opening or surrendering to anything is antithetical to our need for the ego to predominate.
This aspect of practice is also central to Highest Yoga Tantra. In the process of “self generation,” a profound shift of identification is made in which the meditator begins to visualize him or herself as totally transformed into a deity.This transformation is brought about by first dissolving all ordinary appearances, and the identification of the conventional sense of “I” into emptiness. From this sphere of emptiness, the meditator reemerges in the aspect of the deity and its surrounding environment. If we refer to Diagram z, the meditator is, in effect, carrying a subtle quality of awareness across the threshold from the right hand circle into the left, and then returning to the threshold between the two in the form of a deity. This leads to an identification with the rainbow-like form of the deity known as “divine pride,” or “divine confidence.”
Identification with the deity is an identification with our true nature. It becomes an idealization or inflation of the ego only if we have not first dissolved our ordinary ego identity by crossing the threshold into emptiness.
In Tantra there is no room for an inflated idealism that splits us from the guts of our nature, and the powerful shadowy instincts and emotions are the essential ingredients of transformation. This is the energy the tantric deity is specifically intended to evoke and transform.
The total transformation possible in Tantra requires that we include every facet of our being.
The relationship to a deity does not originate exclusively in this way, however. It can also arise through spontaneous revelation or vision. Because the deity is a manifestation of sambhogakaya, an aspect of our Buddha nature, we each have its latent disposition. Dharmakaya, our primordial clear-light mind (left circle of Diagram i), is the essential nature of all archetypal forms that emerge in the domain of sambhogakaya as the pure energy of creative vision. Sambhogakaya, known as “the body of pure bliss,” the “complete enjoyment body,” orthe “illusory body,” is the realm of our fundamental vitality that has the capacity for luminous creative vision. Sambhogakaya is also described as the “purified emotional body,” and is therefore at the root of our qualities of feeling.
There are many variations of the same deity because they originated as visions in the minds of different meditators.
It is not the number of deities practiced that is important, but the depth and openness of our relationship to the deity. When we develop a relationship to a deity and make this the heart of our lives, there is a profound process at work. Transformation is partly dependent on the confidence, trust, and devotion we have
in this relationship, and the tantric deity acts as a transformative catalyst.
For example, the Buddhist deity Heruka Chakrasamvara (fig. 14) has a similar archetypal root to the Hindu Shiva, the Greek Dionysus, and the Celtic Kernunos. The Dionysian cult was carried to India by the Greeks around zoo BCE, and may well have had associations with Shivaism or the tantras. The Hellenistic art of the Greeks also shaped the iconographical depictions of peaceful deities in Buddhist art, many of which were based on the youthful form of Apollo. This occurred during the Greek colonization of parts of India soon after the Buddha’s lifetime.’
Because of this, the answer to the question about deity practice lies partly in relation to the teacher.
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6
The Alchemical Vessel Of Tantra
Moral boundaries are a vital part of the process of transformation for Buddhists, but must be engaged in skillfully. They are usually defined on three levels: the protection of one’s own well-being-the pratinloksha vows; the protection of others-the bodhisattva vows; and maintaining the relationship with the higher Self, the deity, as it is released from the unconscious-the tantric vows.
Self-discipline brings us into relationship with one of the six perfections of the bodhisattva, that of enthusiastic perseverance, which implies the willingness to engage in a process with effort and enthusiasm over a prolonged period. No material or spiritual qualities are gained without some degree of effort. Perseverance enables the practitioner to carry on and trust in the process, even when it feels hopeless.