Tantra Illuminated Quotes

“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. It can only go as far as fulfilling the limited purpose that has been conceived by your limited ego-mind. However, if 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.”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

“Both thoughts and feelings are vibrations of citta, or the “mind-stuff.” They are actually two ends of a single spectrum. If this were not true, we could never talk about our feelings or feel strongly about our ideas. The difference between thoughts and feelings is simply that thoughts are vibrations (vṛttis) with a greater linguistic or logical component, while feelings are vibrations with a greater affective charge. The difference is not absolute but one of degree. For example, when we feel sad, that feeling is nearly always strongly tied to a specific thought, often unconscious. Becoming aware of that thought can help us become unstuck, tapping the latent energy of the feeling.”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

“any beginning student of Śaiva Tantra must become acquainted with Sanderson’s work, beginning with the easier introductory pieces: “Shaivism and the Tantric Traditions,” “Power and Purity among the Brahmins of Kashmir,” and “EPHE Lectures: Long Summary,” all available on alexissanderson.com.”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

“The Divine is here taught as having two aspects, the transcendent and the immanent. The transcendent aspect is called Śiva (SHEE-vuh) and personified as male divinity (sometimes, God). Though Śiva is represented mythologically as having certain characteristics, Tāntrikas (followers of the Tantra) understand Śiva as pure Consciousness: nonpersonal, utterly transcendent of all limitations or qualities, beyond the reach of senses, speech, and mind—in short, the singular Light of Awareness that makes possible all manifestation; the quiescent and peaceful ground of all that is.”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition

“an exercise in what Cabezón calls “academic theology,” or what I would call a self-conscious experiment in well-grounded constructive theology. It weds together the interests and needs of two diverse communities of readers in a way that, I here argue, only a scholar-practitioner is capable of doing. In”
― Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition