Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

by Christopher D. Wallis

In actuality it is only the unbounded Light of Consciousness, reposing in innate bliss, endowed with the Powers of Will, Knowledge, and Action, that we call God. (Essence of the Tantras)

What we discover is that instead of walking a path to reach a specific final destination, we are walking it to learn how to walk it. The moment we fall into simple harmony with the walking, dissolving ideas about our destination or our identity as a walker, path and goal merge into one. In other words, liberation is complete when we are no longer waiting to be liberated.

So, to conclude, future-focused teleology as conceived by most religions is downplayed or at least nuanced by NŚT, even as it is affirmed that 1) there is such a thing as awakening; 2) if you’re not yet fully awake and free, you can be (indeed, you will be, if that is your heart’s desire); and 3) NŚT offers you the necessary guidance to experientially actualize that reality.

That phrase is the key to the issue, for the factor that is actually operative here, differentiating those we wish to call “evil” from those we wish to call “good,” is their relative degree of ignorance of the true nature of reality.

So, everyone, everywhere, is doing exactly the same thing: living in precise accordance with their view of reality and trying to maximize their happiness and freedom in the most effective way they can see from within their worldview.

orienting to the most tangible and obvious level of reality (your body, thoughts, etc.), which is also the level of maximal difference from other forms, you start to identify with that level and thereby lose awareness of the subtle dimensions of your being wherein the pattern of the whole universe is encoded. Seeing only part of the whole but taking it to be the Whole is what we mean by ignorance, and ignorance gives rise to suffering because it entails a misalignment with reality as it is.

“When a man looks at the horizon of his own knowledge and believes he sees the horizon of knowledge itself, then he is truly lost.”

This desire is called rāga, most accurately translated as “the nonspecific craving for worldly experience.”43 It

In the context of NŚT, Śiva is not the name of a god. Rather, the word is understood to signify the peaceful, quiescent ground of all Reality, the infinite silence of transcendent Divinity, or, in the poet’s phrase, the “still point at the center of the turning world.” While Śakti is extroversive, immanent, manifest, omniform, and dynamic, Śiva is introversive, transcendent, unmanifest, formless, and still. Śiva is the absolute void of pure Consciousness. (To be more accurate, Consciousness is never absolutely still, so on the level of the Śiva-tattva, there is what Abhinava calls kiṃcit-calana, an extraordinarily subtle movement, an imperceptible and exquisitely sweet undulation.)

For example, we erroneously believe that “external” reality shapes our inner world but not the other way around; whereas in fact, both aspects are constantly shaping and reshaping each other in a two-way dialectical process.

“We rise by the support of the same ground that trips us.”

We must therefore be skeptical of our hunches and investigate their real nature. One way to tell the difference between the arising of true intuitive insight (from the Parā level) and the arising of deep conditioning (from the Paśyantī level) is this: when we question the hunch, if it comes from saṃskāras, the mind will defend and justify it, arguing for its validity and pointing to the “evidence” that seems to corroborate it. By contrast, when we question a real intuition, it remains silent. The insight does not justify or explain itself, but offers itself as a gift. It takes practice to listen to the voice that is quieter than the mind.

And this is not surprising, for the model is provided by the very name of the school of Tantra with which Abhinava is most associated: the Trika or “Trinity,” whose central teaching is that the triad of the individual soul, Śakti, and Śiva are, in reality, three expressions of an undifferentiated unity, the timeless ground of all reality, known as the Heart of Being.

Sit on a cushion that elevates the hips so that they are at least as high as the knees. Leaning forward, pull back on the flesh of the buttocks and upper thighs and then sit straight again, creating a gentle rotation in the hips that allows the spine to elongate upward more easily. Let the sit bones ground down firmly, while the crown of the head rises up, creating an elongation in the spine. Let the head float at the top of the spine like a waterlily floating

on the surface of a pond. [Divya-karaṇa:] Let the back of the neck be long and let the chin drop gently, unclenching the teeth and releasing the jaw. Let all the muscles of the face soften and release (you may wish to use your knuckles to massage your eyebrow ridges and jaw hinge to help them release). Let the eyes sink back in the eye sockets. Finally, gently curl the tongue upward a bit and let its tip point toward the crown of the head. All the other muscles of the face and head should be slack.166