The Art of Tantra [antikvár]

Fundamental attitudes Tantra is a spccial manifestation of Indian feeling, art and religion. It may really be understood, in the last resort, by people who are prepared to undertake inner meditative action. There can be no quick and easy definitions. They have been tried; but they either turn out to be so broad and general if they are expressed in Indian words that they scarcely mean anything to the Westerner, or so narrow that they are only true for a part of the enormous and diffuse reality. There are many variations of practice and belief However, there is one thread which can guide us through the labyrinth; all the different manifestations of Tantra can be strung on it. This thread is the idea that Tantra is a cult of ecstasy, focused on a vision of cosmic sexuality. Life-styles, ritual, magic, myth, philosophy and a complex of signs and emotive symbols converge upon that vision. The basic texts in which these are conveyed are also called Tantras. Tantra does also include images and ideas from the oldest strata of Indian religion, many from the Aiyan Veda and Upanisads, often reinterpreting them in visual terms by diagrams and personification. Tantra has a particular wisdom of its own. This sets it apart from all other religious and psychological systems, especially those traditional to the orthodox Brahmins. The other systems agree in asserting that our real world is a meaningless illusion, that the mental play of forms which we call our experience of life and the world is utterly without value. They show that all those experiences which ordinarily we cherish most, such as love for our lovers and children, food, the intense emotional joy nature, music and art can produce, even the adoration we may feel for a personal God, are merely traps, whose grip on us has to be prised loose. We must learn to reject totally any fondness for worldly experience of any kind, so as to allow our whole attention to be flooded with a consuming abstract vision of the Brahman, i.e. 'The Truth', 'The undivided whole', which is the ultimate Ground of Being. According to the Brahmin systems, when we manage to stay permanently in this state of attention, with our