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

The Tantrik masters evolved their teachings and techniques as an unbroken whole, a well-crafted interconnected matrix designed to free you permanently from ignorance and suffering. So when you understand the profound and exquisite vision of reality that was originally taught in connection to these yogic practices, this knowledge empowers your pract

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton

section.) The Krama school of NŚT teaches that we can observe the divine acts of sṛṣṭi, sthiti, and saṃhāra in the arising and falling away of each and every cognition

This state of awareness in which you are completely in tune with reality, immersed in your divine nature, is called samāveśa.

The purpose of walking the spiritual path, from the nondual Tantrik perspective, is simply to undermine your misidentification and directly reveal within the immediacy of your awareness the fact that the divine Powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing, and Acting comprise the totality of your individual experience as well—thereby triggering

associated with a specific religious tradition, the religion of Śiva-Śakti, also known as Shaivism, the dominant religion of India throughout the medieval period.

What we discover is that instead of walking a path to reach a specific final destination, we are walking it to learn how to walk it. The moment we fall into simple harmony with the walking, dissolving ideas about our destination or our identity as a walker, path and goal merge into one. In other words, liberation is complete when we are no longer w

But, and this can hardly be said too many times, ānanda is simply the chief by-product of realization, it is not the goal of the path, and it is not more divine than anything else. If you think otherwise, you will starting grasping after it and building a new “spiritual” self-image around it, and then you are caught again. Probably the greatest pit

Let me clarify that here “worship” means—at the very least—the actual evocation of the power of the Deity and interaction with it. More commonly, it means becoming that deity through techniques of ritualized meditation and/or meditative ritual, either temporarily or as part of a process by which any perception of difference between oneself and the