Tantra, Human Revelation/Shadow, and Passion

Photo by Madeleine Lewis

(Entry reposted from May 06 Integral New York City salon discussion list)

There is something so ripe and deep and beautiful in the revelation of our stories.  Open conversation brings human confusion and denial from shadow to light..from the unconscious to the conscious, from the unspoken to the spoken, from the secret to the revealed.  Imagine everyone bringing their previous difficult experiences into the open and discussing them ...with responsibility and deep self-reflection...albeit with questions that remain.   Imagine how much more i/we could learn from the tales and insights of others with this kind of strength, depth, openness to learning and self-honesty.   

This morning i immersed myself in a book called Yoga Spandakarika by Daniel Odier.  He is a scholar with a gift of presenting very simply an integration of the texts of Ch'an, Dzogchen, and the Chinese, Tibetan and Kashmiri Mahamudras. He says:  

"The great subtlety of the Tantric masters was to take the whole of human passions and to ask themselves these questions: "How to make it so that all is used, nothing is denied, nothing is rejected? How to make it so that we will not find ourselves one day face to face with our own demons, who always come back in hordes to destroy the quest? .....The Tantric approach..is to engage ourselves completely with our human characteristics and to accept the whole of what we are. ....Once we start to understand this dynamic, we realize that there really is no place for sublimation. There is simply the act of looking deeply at what is there and of allowing whatever has remained buried to come up out of the ground and open like a budding flower." 

He then goes on to say that as we look at every desire, thought, feeling experience that arises we realize that it isn't a specific desire or passion that brings suffering...but a limitation of that desire or passion (i.e. contracting around it in any way). Instead, if we completely open to it and accept it, we liberate ourselves and everything into the infinite space of the "heart" or supreme consciousness.   "Once passion is freed from suffering [contraction around an object], it becomes even more intense....there is now an impassioned energy that continually quenches our thirst.  ...this spherical kundalini, which unfurls from the heart and permeates the totality of space, is quite simply absolute love. ...Absolute love is neurotic love ...whose limits have quite simply exploded and evaporated:"

Addendum 10/2007

And simultaneously, expansion and contraction are One, like the yin/yang symbol.  One cannot exist without the other.  Contraction is embraced/dissolved in the expansion and expansion is embraced/dissolved into contraction.  The dance happens.