Continued .....
Tantra tells us: remain continuously open toward love and acceptance, whether you are approaching yourself, others, the phenomena of the world or the events of life. Observe yourself and notice which part of your being seeks condemnation and opens you toward fear and anger. Through this continual observation, do not allow that part of your being to become the tyrannical ruler of your inner world.

Tantra gives us the possibility of accepting the Self, others and the world with an open heart and without condemnation, remaining open to understanding them through love. It asks us to allow ourselves to feel more, to live with greater intensity and depth, and through expanding the heart to expand the spirit.

By choosing such a path, Tantra, in my understanding, becomes a way of living which in its expression is neither a religion nor a doctrine nor a philosophical system. It may therefore perhaps be a way of living within any system of belief or philosophy, and one might find a Tantric reading within any system of thought that has not closed itself to compassion and love.

The truth is that an angry Buddhist, Jew, Christian, or believer in any philosophical or religious system who remains open to violence shares, at a fundamental level, the same condition: a human being who has chosen to keep the self closed to love and compassion. In practice, their mode of being and living is not fundamentally different from that of a Nazi soldier, a torturer at Guantánamo, or an ISIS fighter, because the evident truth of human living is that we either live with compassion, love and acceptance—a Tantric way of living—or, emptied of these qualities, choose to live through aversion, fear, judgement and condemnation.

Tantra is founded upon unity with the world, freedom and compassion. It regards these qualities as nothing other than the truth of what may be called a realised human being. For this reason, if we choose such a way of life, then by putting this vision into practice we move each day closer to our true Self, because Tantra is a path toward a Self greater than the self we presently are. To embrace it, we too must each day become larger, more open and more expansive.

In the second part of this piece, which I will write in the coming days, I will retell the beautiful, symbolic and remarkable story of how the Songs of Saraha—Saraha meaning “the one who has released the arrow from the bow”—came to be composed, and how they express the Tantric vision: the story of the birth and emergence of Tantra as a mystical vision from within Vedic and Buddhist traditions, eventually becoming an independent path within Tibetan Buddhism. Even the expression of Tantric wisdom through Saraha’s songs and in the language of poetry is deeply harmonious with the vision this tradition seeks. The language of logic and masculine philosophy seeks to master and explain meaning; the language of poetry, filled with a feminine spirit, seeks to understand and receive meaning. Tantra is a path of understanding, acceptance and openness toward the world through expanding the anima of the human spirit.

Aydin Areta
August 2019