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

by Christopher D. Wallis

Essence manifests form.

chance to effectively orient you to the original Tantrik worldview: a way of seeing and understanding reality that can challenge and illuminate you to the deepest levels of your being.

tradition, it is also true that learning them helps us replace our fantasies about how things are (and were) with the reality of things. This is a process that challenges us in at least three important ways. It challenges us to accept the world as it is, rather than how we would like it to be. It grounds us in an awareness of the very human difficulties involved with learning, teaching, and living a spiritual path, thereby helping us to cultivate compassion for others and patience with ourselves. Finally, it prevents us from using shaky or downright incorrect historical claims to justify what we think is the best path or the most correct form of yoga practice.

It is also true that yoga can only take you so far if its attainments are being used to reinforce a skewed or misaligned view of reality. This explains why some great yogis in medieval India became sorcerers, drunk on power; and why some prominent yogis today, similarly deluded, have manipulated their students and wielded their power for personal gain. Yoga (and even more so Tantrik Yoga) gives power, and that power can magnify whatever is present: it makes a good person into a saint and a jerk into an even greater and more effective jerk. Realizing this fact, which accounts for so much otherwise disillusioning behavior in the world of yoga, we may begin to take a leaf out of ancient India’s book and require students to be well-versed in right View before they are considered intermediate, let alone advanced.

The great master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice yoga from the perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfill its ultimate purpose because it is a practice founded on wrong understanding.

you undertake the practice of yoga with the right View of yourself, that you already are a perfect and whole expression of the Divine and that you are doing yoga to realize and then fully express what is already true, then you have empowered your practice to take you all the way.

another form of your love for them—experienced in that way, it becomes a thing of sharp beauty.