Hindu/Buddhist Tantra

We have two ways of knowing. Our mind knows forms, things, both subtle and gross. Faces, hands, buildings, trees, math formulas, mind knows subject and the mind knows otherness. The mind knows dualities, the mind knows me and you, us and them, and this and that. Mind knows time, mind knows the past, the present and the sense of the future. The mind knows things and entities, the mind knows beings, infinite numbers of beings and things. The mind knows difference. The mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through imagery, the mind has sense and the mind has memory. The mind knows dualistically.

The chapter builds on the work of previous scholars on the Esoteric Buddhist mantra in Sanskrit inscribed on a circa 8th-century gold foil recovered from the Ratu Boko prominence in Central Java, and identifies two hitherto unnoticed attestations of it in two sources from Bali—one in a Sanskrit Buddhist hymn (the Pañcakāṇḍa), the other in a Sanskrit-Old Javanese Śaiva text (the Gaṇapatitattva). Through an analysis of related textual sources from the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia, the study casts new light on the context and function of the Ratu Boko artefact, and elaborates on the religious and socio-political scenarios opened up by it.

Timeless awareness is the essence of Dzogchen. Time experienced within timeless awareness is also an expression of the essence of Dzogchen. Dzogchen is an ancient form of Tibetan mystic humanism. Dzogchen makes the essential distinction between mind and awareness. A person can be located in mind alone and locked in time. As a person shifts from being located in mind alone (mindfulness) and goes beyond mind alone (mindfulness), one becomes aware of their own awareness. As we focus our awareness on our own innermost awareness, vast dimensions of awareness begin to open and self-reveal its nature to us. Awareness is a multidimensional experience and this awareness is infinite in its horizons. The innate qualities of awareness are spaciousness or openness or emptiness. Another quality of our awareness is luminous radiance and still another is awareness as energy. Awareness is alive and is both vast stillness and unceasing movement. The Union of Mind and Awareness When a person is able to experience the union of their mind and their awareness, then the person has a simultaneous experience of being in time and in timeless awareness. The mind is the place of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination and the mind is the mode of knowing singularity and difference in the world. This is the realm of ordinary knowingness and this is the realm of duality. Our mind is the realm of time. This time bound knowing is the knowing of you and I, us and them, this or that in time and place.

It is not easy to understand the nature of the guru and understanding the nature of the guru can be bewildering. There is often bewilderment about the guru. One source of the bewilderment is that people think that the guru is an individual person and for most people the understanding that the guru is not a person has been foreclosed. The guru is not a person. And when people see and believe the guru is a person, such a belief will create illusions about the person whom they think is the guru, and their own relationship with the person whom they see as the guru will fall into various forms of the psychology of transference. Moreover, the true and pervasive nature of the guru will be concealed and the power of the guru limited and anthropomorphized, and politicized. To use Heideggerian language the ontic dimension will become the focus and the ontological dimension becomes foreclosed. In fact, the guru is not an entity, the guru is not a thing, and the guru is not even a being. The guru is the field of Being. The guru is the field of Being's manifestation of understanding, manifestation of protection and manifestation of self-revelation. The guru is the radiance of primordial awareness. The contemporary master of Kashmir Shavism, Swami Muktananda would teach, using the language of theology, " the guru is the grace bestowing power of God. " He would also say " The guru is your own innermost awareness and you must get beyond your mind to experience the guru as your own awareness. " Vehicle-ness It is also equally true that a person can be vehicle of the guru. Even you and I can be a vehicle for the guru. The light of the guru can manifest and shine forth through you and me, and through everyone. The power of the guru does not manifest only through institutional religious teachers as some would like you to think, but most often this manifestation is through

The phenomenology of the unfolding elaboration of our capacity to know Being directly and as well as our experience to know Being through beings is the focus of this paper. I will focus on the phenomenological elaboration of our knowing of mind; the phenomenological knowing of direct awareness and the consequent simultaneous intertwining of knowing through mind and through awareness. This union of our mind and our awareness allows the knowing of Being through beings and knowing the indivisibleness of beings and Being. As the Dakini said to Dudjom Lingpa " You and I are indivisible. " Our paper begins with a phenomenological elaboration of the Two Ways of Knowing. This is a necessary and a most useful distinction for our knowing of both beings and Being simultaneously. The Two Ways of Knowing: Mind Knowing Form and Awareness Knowing Being Mind Knows Form! Our mind knows forms, and things, both subtle and gross. Our mind knows beings and things. Our mind knows subject and our mind knows otherness. Our mind knows dualities .Our mind knows me and you, us and them and this and that. Mind knows time. Our mind knows the sense of the past, the sense of present and a sense of the future. The mind knows entities. Our mind knows difference. Our mind thinks conceptually, feels affectively, imagines through images, the mind senses sensation and the mind has memory. The mind always knows dualistically. Our mind thinks and knows through thoughts, our mind feels and knows through feelings, our mind has sensations, knows through sensation and our mind has fantasy and knows through imagination. The knowledge of our mind is mediated through conceptualization and representational thinking. Our mind can even know the mind of others. However, our mind cannot know Being and our mind cannot know the Being-ness of beings. Our mind cannot experience Being. Our mind cannot know Being directly. Awareness Knows Being! Our awareness directly knows Being and our awareness can directly know the Being-ness of beings. Being itself is not a being and Being manifests beings, infinite numbers of beings. Being manifests Being within beings as their own being. Being itself is not an entity and Being is not a being. Being is not a thing. Being is non-duality. Being knows the non-duality of everything and anything. Being is oneness and pervasiveness. Being is openness, and Being self-manifests as radiant light. Being is compassionate creative resonance. Being manifests presence. Our awareness can know the indivisible presence of the Being-ness of beings within beings and between beings. Being manifests duality, although Being is completely non-dual. By becoming aware of awareness, we experience primordial awareness which is the ground of being, which is Being itself. Awareness is Being. Awareness is Being knowing Being. Being knows Being and is the Being-ness of all the beings. Awareness can be timeless as well as awareness can be in time. Awareness can be timelessness and in time simultaneously.

so clearly shows in his dissertation, between the 8 th and 14 th centuries there were illuminating phenomenological distinctions that were considered essential to understand the great perfection practice of awareness, becoming aware of awareness. These distinctions were primarily made by the Nyingma masters of meditation. The most basic distinction is between the mind of dualistic experience (sems) and the primordial awareness of naturalistic non-dualistic experience or primordial knowingness (ye shes) or (semde). This ye shes is non dualistic knowingness. Unfortunately, many Buddhist texts describe dualism as deluded and non-dualism as non-deluded. This language of delusion is highly prejudiced and is nihilistic in tone and devalues the oneness of the two truths (conventional and absolute reality). They devalue the indivisibility of appearance and awareness and moreover, challenge the validity of the foundational human experience of oneness and difference or duality within non duality. This negative use of language unhappily challenges the divinity of appearance and invalidates the human experience of the Nirmanakaya dimension which is ordinary life. The differentiation and distinction of mind from awareness prevents the bewildering confusion of mind and awareness resulting in the negation of either the experience of non-duality or the experience of duality. Much of the understanding about the difference between mind and awareness was presented in the unfolding of the seventeen Atiyoga tantras that brought forth the heart essence tradition (sying thig). These teachings and instructions are part of the instructional teachings of Dzogchen. These teachings are instructional in the forms of skillful means or praxis for bringing the experience of awareness of awareness into completion. This completion is experiencing the fullness of experience of personal awareness within the vast infinite and multidimensional field of awareness. The essential method is to experience directly and completely primordial knowingness as well as the manifestations of this primordial knowingness such as mind, innermost subjectivity and external phenomenal appearance. Mind, subjectivity and all appearance are the manifestation of primordial knowingness itself. Primordial awareness is the primordial and abiding pervasive condition. Our experience of non-conceptual knowingness or non-conceptual perception opens us to the direct understanding and direct non-conceptual experience that everything and anything is the manifestation of primordial or ground awareness. Primordial awareness is radiance openness or radiant emptiness. Primordial awareness is not simply emptiness alone but the oneness of openness and radiance spaciousness as light. The incompleteness of emptiness alone is recognized by the 14 th century Nyingma master Longchenpa. Awareness is the union of spaciousness and radiance.

2008; in Almogi, Orna, ed. Contributions to Tibetan Buddhist Literature. PIATS 2006: Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Königswinter 2006. Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung 14. Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies (pp. 277-314).

Carl Jung describes how the human unconscious is the hidden cosmological archetypal dimension of our being in the world. There is the personal unconscious that reflects personal history and experience either forgotten or foreclosed. There is another unconscious that is more primary, pre-reflective and cosmological in origin. In the language of the ancient Phenomenological Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, this existential dimension of archetypal manifestation is called the Sambogakaya realm of experience. This is the subtle realm of lucid forms of light and energy and vortices. These forms of light and energy field configurations become everything and anything. The Sambogakaya dimension manifests the Nirmanakaya dimension. The Nirmanakaya dimension is the actual experience of our self in contextual situations, unfolding through time and space as well as our unfolding of our personal psychological experience. Nirmanakaya is the dimension of our ordinary life world. Nirmanakaya is our being in the world. There is one more dimension. This dimension is the primordial foundational ground of everything and anything. In the ancient tradition of Dzogchen this is named as the Dharmakaya. Dharmakaya is the existential dimension of pure potentiality, pure creativity from which everything and anything manifests. Dharmakaya manifests the Sambogakaya. Dharmakaya is ground awareness, the ground of being. Dharmakaya is Being. Being is not a being but Being manifesting being as infinite numbers of numerous beings. All beings are the manifestation of Being. Dharmakaya is not an entity but manifests infinite numbers of entities.

One Knower: Different Modes of Knowing In all philosophical and psychological traditions knowing has many different meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism there is nondual Dzogchen and in Hinduism there is nondual Kashmir Shaivism. In both these nondual traditions there is profound understanding that there is one knower with two different modes of knowing. My Mind Knowing You and Things One mode of our knowing is the conventional subject object knowing which is the mind knowing as the perceiver and the perceived. This is our ordinary knowing of mind, my mind knowing you and things. This is my mind knowing of all the various forms of otherness. This is my mind knowing of singular aspects of phenomena and my mind knowing, by discrimination, the differences within phenomena. This is my mind knowing of the reality of objects, and the actuality of events and situations. This is my mind knowing the reality of persons and sentient beings as well as non-sentient beings and things. This is my mind's natural mode of dualistic knowingness. My Knowing as Direct Perception As humans knowing we both have and are this wonderful other mode of knowing. In Dzogchen this is the great knowing of awareness and through awareness, and this knowing described as direct perception is often called gnosis, or jnana, or ye she. Kashmir Shaivism names this dimension of knowing of this vast field of awareness/consciousness vimarsa. This vast

Scan of a translation of and commentary on a 17th-century Vaisnava Sahajiya Tantric text.  Originally Ch. 12 of Tantra in Practice, edited by David Gordon White, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 223-241.  Deals with subtle yogic physiology, Tantric rituals, sexuality, and appropriation of Yoga and Gaudiya Vaisnavism.

For much of my personal and professional life I have had an enduring interest in the distinction between mind and awareness. As my education unfolded over these many years, I have been happy to recognize that this distinction between mind and awareness is of serious consideration in continental phenomenology, in forms of psychoanalytic understanding such as the object relations work of Donald Winnicott, as well as in many forms of the experiential psychotherapies such as Gestalt, experiential focusing, in Ericksonian hypnosis, structural family therapy, archetypal psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, existential psychoanalysis to name a few. When I began to extend my interest based on continental phenomenology into the eastern wisdom traditions, I found the same distinction within the Hindu Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shavism. Later in my life I found the same distinction within the Tibetan non-dual Nyingma tradition of Dzogchen. In my study of the Qi Gong tradition, I had the good fortune of being able to study for a number of years with Dr. Yan Xin who is a most remarkable healer and who has this same distinction of mind and awareness in his form of Daoist Qi Gong. From an historical view point, this distinction of mind and awareness was central in gnostic philosophy and gnostic theology. In contemporary Jungian archetypal psychology there is a similar distinction between the knowing of mind of ordinary life world of lived experience and the knowing of the archetypal dimension of lived experience, as well as the knowing of the primordial awareness dimension of pure potentiality. I have also had this interest in and through the phenomena of my own knowingness, the knowing of self, the knowing of others and of knowing of the encompassing nature of Existential Being. I have had for as long as I can remember, the sense of the explicit experience of my mind as explicit thoughts, and explicit feelings and explicit sensations and explicit imaginative imagery, and at the same time a subtle sense of tacit or implicate or implicit sense of intuitive knowing. In this way I have always felt I had two ways of knowing.

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me-ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness. The sense of me-ness reflects the being in mind alone, and the sense of whoness reflects being deeply within the awareness field. Whoness manifests most directly as pause and within the pause. The pause is unbound in betweeness…the space in between..transitional spaciousness. When the spaciousness of the breathless breath opens whoness can be felt as uncontained and unbound. Whoness is experiential openness….openess without a name or prior to name. We may say openness prior to mind. Dasein to use Heideggarian language. When the breathless breath manifests the experience is always mysterious. What does breathless breath mean? Breathless means no breath, there is no breath. The word breath here, in this context signifies that there is no breath but there is respiration. There is this inner most experience of no breath, no inhaling or exhaling of air and yet there is respiration. There is a respiration without breath and beyond breath. For instance, in the Kechari mudra this breathless breath experience takes place. The breath stops and yet there is an inner sense of breathless respiration. This experience of respiration without breath is described in various traditions of eastern philosophy. In the Dzogchen tradition Longchenpa describes the experience in his great text Words and Meaning. This

The lucidity of awareness is experienced directly through the doorway of our subjectivity as our own innermost awareness. As we gaze into our own interiority we can experience the unfolding of the manifestation of this field of radiance and this lucidity of awareness. The invisible field of luminous knowingness becomes experientially visible. Lucidity of Phenomena Experientially visible means seeing the flashes of light, sensing light, experiencing the presence of the radiance within us and beyond us. Experiencing the presence of the radiance means feeling the luminous experience of the light and the energy of the light in everything and anything, in anyone and everyone. As we experience the visibility of luminous knowingness within us as us, we are empowered to experience the manifestation of the lucidity within the appearance of all phenomena. Lucidity is not only within us but within all phenomena, all appearance has lucidity and all appearance is lucidity. All phenomena are the manifestation of primordial radiance. When we are experiencing the radiance of phenomenon, our inner light is meeting the outer light, and thus there is only one indivisible light. In truth there is only primordial luminous radiance that is manifesting our mind, our body and our innermost awareness, as well as the infinitely vast universal context of phenomena that we are placed within in time and in space. Our capacity to experience the radiance of the field of awareness within our own embodied subjectivity opens for us the ability to gaze into the subjectivity of all phenomena. By gazing into our own subjectivity there arises this intersubjective gaze that is direct and inside to inside. This intersubjective gaze allows us to experience the luminous openness of all phenomena and context. This intersubjective gaze opens the innermost openness of all phenomena. Subjectivity is the openness of our being to Being itself within all beings.

“So it is not by democracy, but by entrusting power to the true Tantrics, that equality in the economic and social spheres must be established in this material world.” “The process of transforming latent divinity into the Supreme Divinity is known as Tantra”, according to Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar.  P. R. Sarkar, (1921-1990), was a spiritual teacher (also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) in the tradition of Shiva and Krishna, who propounded PROUT (Progressive Utilization Theory) and who founded the socio-spiritual movement Ananda Marga (“the Path of Bliss”).  –  Richard Gauthier, Department of Chemistry and Physics, Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa, California, USA, May 2, 2021.

In this practice of becoming aware of our own awareness, the qualities of this awareness, of this field become more and more manifest...more known and more felt as a felt sense. The felt sense of the presence of awareness becomes embodied, becomes flesh, becoming luminous flesh. Awakened awareness! As the experience of awareness unfolds, and the qualities of awareness become experienced and become embodied, the quality of spaciousness or primordial openness unfolds. The quality of light, the quality of being light, the felt sense of light, the experience of radiance, the radiance of the field flows beyond one's body boundary. This quality of light and radiance can also be experienced as energy, as Shakti, as chi or as sublime vibrations. The undulation of the primordial pulsation, as bliss, as Maha Suka overcomes suffering in its fullness, completeness and enough-ness. This light as radiance manifests the bringing forth of the quality of compassionate resonance and knowingness as light. The quality of non-duality, of oneness, of indivisibility, arises, inside to inside, directly, as unmediated primordial boundedness, primordial at home-ness. The Self arises as well as Self-liberation. This unfolding process of embodiment of the foundational state manifests over time and through time as timeless awareness in time. In the beginning we may feel that we are holding the experience and holding this awareness. Then one day we begin to experience it as if we are entering into this awareness as the field above us and below us, in front us, behind us and through us. We enter the field and are surrounded by a sphere of awareness. We are in the qualities of space, light, energy and resonance. Then one moment in time, one day, we become this field of energy. We become the field of light. We become spaciousness. We become openness. We become resonance. We become non-duality within duality. Aham Ah. I am becoming what I am and who I am. Aham Ah. As this experience unfolds, we begin to feel these qualities not only as the qualities of our own innermost awareness as lucidity, as light, but we begin to experience the quality of the lucidity in phenomena, in the light of appearances. We experience lucidity in otherness, for example, lucidity in

Being within awareness as awareness and being with another who is within awareness is a most powerful skillful means to bring forth awareness within one's self and within each other. Two awarenesses are better than one, just as self regulation can be enhanced by co self regulation on the bodily dimension. Self-illumination is a co-emergent process between and within companions, compassionate companions. The lucidity within one's own awareness, as one's own awareness can experience the lucidity within the other's awareness as lucidity. It is true, awareness awakens awareness both in one's self and in the other. This is the secret of the tantra. The luminous energy within one's own body can resonate to the luminous energy in the other's body, deepening the mutual embodiment of light. Light is awareness and awareness is light. The attunement to awareness within one's own body can bring forth the attunement of awareness within the body of the other. The self arising of the awareness field in one's self resonates to the self arising of awareness within the other's body. The self arising of the energy or the chi or the shakti can bring forth the self arising within each other and can bring forth the sustaining of the energy field within each other. In essence, humanness is the manifestation of light, and the manifestation of primordial luminous energy, and the openness of the great space of compassion.

By becoming aware of awareness we can experience the innermost sense or the felt sense of spaciousness and self-illumination. Within this state of open awareness, the openness of spacious luminous awareness, we can enter the experience of the radiance of light as energy through the sublime, luminous vibrations. The experience of the unfolding of sublime awareness and the corresponding energetic manifestation of the self-arising of primordial awareness is self-liberation. These experiences of the sublime manifestation of luminous energy was described by the 14 th century Dzogchen master Longchenpa in his text Precious Treasury of The Genuine Meaning. This meditative experience often arises spontaneously in Dzogchen meditation practice. This experience of translucent energetic manifestation is also described in Chan Buddhism, Hindu Kashmir Shavism, and Yan Xin Qi Gong. This experience of energetic manifestation can be experienced within subtle forms of respiration. Sometimes the ongoing sense of subtle luminous respiration can be experienced even as there is a profound sense of breathlessness. Breathlessness used here means no breath or minimal breath. This experience of the ongoing sense of respiration without breath is very powerful and empowering. In this experience of vast stillness there is no breath and yet there arises from deep within, a most subtle respiration within the breathlessness. During this respiration of stillness, the body seems to breathe and be breathed by most subtle inner wind. The inner sense of stillness expands and extends throughout the entire body and beyond the body's boundaries. This stillness opens us into the dimension of potential space, the dharmakaya and pure awareness.

The  connection  between  the  soul  and  eros  within  Jewish  esotericism  has  been  well established  in  the  academy  by  scholars  such  as  Moshe  Idel,  Elliot  Wolfson  and  more recently  Charles  Mopsik.  However,  although  frequently  compared  with  eastern  tantric schools, the praxis aspect of kabbalistic sexual methods is still shrouded in mystery.  By examining  Talmudic,  Heichalot  texts,  and  zoharic  references,  as  well  as  medieval  and early  modern  kabbalistic  sources  from  the  schools  of  Abraham  Abulafia  (1239-1291), Moses  Cordovero  (1522-1570)  and  Isaac  Luria  (1534-1572),  this  paper  explores  for  the first  time  what  may  be  the  forgotten  sexual  school of  mysticism  within  Jewish esotericism. Moreover, this paper examines not only the role of the soul within the sexual act itself but also the enigmatic intentions behind its operations. Finally, this paper argues that  while  the  original  aim  behind  these  procedures  was  to  produce  theurgic  results, modern  occultist  thinkers  within  western  esotericism  such  as  Paschal  Beverly  Randolph (1825-1875) and Julius Evola (1898-1974) utilized the same theurgic methodologies and reappropriated them into magical applications.

Language is not simply about signs and signification. There is a tension between wording and word signs. Language is not simply the issue of signs and signification, but the emergence and manifestation of Being within human beings. The field of Being is unceasingly manifesting within human beings. The field of Being's manifestation of being within human beings may eventually become articulated as signs and symbols. The energetic manifestation of Being unfolds into signs and symbols of signification. Being manifests experientially as the felt sense of sublime vibrations and pulsations of energy becoming sound, sound becoming letters and letters becoming words and signifiers. In mind alone there is only the emphasis on the play of signification and the unfixed relations between signified and signifier. This is language as representation. This is also the language of reification. The language of awareness begins as the language of sublime vibrations, pulsations within the direct felt sense of inner experience. Mind alone is language as information. On the contrary the languaging of awareness within the awareness field is informing us and bringing us into the experience of beingness within the field of Being. Language within the field as the field expresses and manifests the energy of the word. The word, both written and spoken, is the energy of the field of Being embodied within us and expanding within us. The energetic field dimension of words and letters gives us and invokes within us the felt sense of Being. Language is the manifestation of Being within beings. Language is the medium of the field, just as the body is a medium of the field. Language and embodiment are co-emergent mediums of the field. Language arising within the body is a medium of the field within human embodiment. Language invokes the field, communicates the field and rides within and through the field. Sound is the vibration of field. Articulated sound is the field becoming words. As sounds are spoken, sound becomes syllables and letters arising from within our embodiment of the field. Our embodiment manifests configurations of the field. We are configurations of the field of awareness embodied in time and space. Sound and articulated syllables manifest the field within beings as Being. By giving Being to beings there is an opening for the symbolic signification and signifier. There is a felt difference in the relation and character of signifiers to significant within mind alone. Within the continuum of the awareness field, there is the self-manifestation of non-discursive experience becoming discursive experience. In mind alone signifiers are the representation of mind's ideation. Words arising within the embodiment of the field of awareness symbolize awareness. The symbolization of awareness experientially brings forth the sense of awareness in depth and breath and expresses the vast range of psyche. Language symbolizes awareness and language manifests awareness. Words symbolize the experiencing of the field within the field of Being as beingness. Words and beingness are in fluid intermingling oneness.