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Awareness, Energy and Consciousness in Tantra
Human existence is a dual state and we live in a dual universe: male and female, light and dark, day and night, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, life and death, and so on. It is the aim of yoga and tantra to unify our experience of duality so that we can also experience unity, the transcendent state beyond death.
Tantra describes the human being and the world as having two main poles of existence; consciousness and energy. The human being, the microcosm, has an individual consciousness and an individual life-force that fuels this existence. The world, the macrocosm, has the dual elements of cosmic consciousness and cosmic creative power. Consciousness is the passive pole of existence and creative power is the active pole of existence.
Consciousness, Shiva in Sanskrit, is our true nature and essence, the eternal, unchanging, transcendent part of us. It is the capacity to be aware and to know, and is the source of all knowledge. Consciousness has no attributes or characteristics, and is not subject to time and space, or to karma and suffering. It is the invisible aspect of being with which the yogi wishes to unite. The more consciousness we have the more we can experience the divine within us and transform unconscious, contracted, limiting, and potentially painful states into conscious, alive, creative and spontaneous, states.
Creative power, Shakti, is the eternally changing, active power that creates time and space, both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Shakti is the vast power behind all creation that implements the knowledge of consciousness. Shakti creates all beings and things, the body-mind, all experience, thought, emotion and feeling, all interactions and karma. Shakti powers and drives the body-mind, the visible, tangible part of ourselves. Shakti has both infinite, visible forms and also has an invisible unmanifest essence.
The unmanifest is more powerful than, and controls the manifest. The visible universe of names and forms arises from the unmanifest and invisible. Living forms are vehicles which carry individual consciousness and they can be awake, dreaming, or asleep.
We are generally much more conscious of the manifest aspects of life than the unmanifest. However, if we can connect to the deeper, more subtle parts of us we can access great strength and find meaning in life. The tantric practitioner seeks to contact and form a relationship with the unmanifest in order to come into direct contact with inner power and esoteric knowledge, and to have a more potent, real experience of life.
The tantric practitioner injects energy into the deeper parts of him or herself to feel those parts. It is a tantric maxim that wherever Shakti goes Shiva must follow, and vice versa. As we inject energy into the subtle elements of our body-mind awareness grows and allows us to perceive, feel and experience these parts that may previously have been dormant.
Tantra teaches us to value and develop our awareness at all times and under all circumstances. Through ritual and yogic techniques tantra teaches us how to cultivate energy, and how to link that energy to consciousness; to become more aware. Awareness is the critical faculty that we cultivate so that we can feel and understand what is happening in us and in our lives, so that we can experience life more acutely.
About the Author(s):
In 2004, Dr Swami Shankardev and Jayne Stevenson decided to pool their talents to create Big Shakti. They co-create various seminars and workshops, which Swami Shankardev presents throughout Australia, USA, Europe and India.
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