Post by lightmystic on Jul 18, 2009 12:02:20 GMT -5
Jul 18, 2009 10:10:32 GMT -5 @illuminate said:
Tantra and Relational ConsciousnessEXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 43, HEAVENS AND HELLS OF THE MIND BY IMRE VALLYON
Tantra is Relational Consciousness. What is relationship? Relationship is a connection or happening between you and some other person or object. If nothing is going on between you and something else, then there is no relationship.
You can avoid relationships. The ascetic, the yogi, the sannyasin, the monk, the nun and the renunciate avoid relationship. They are not related to anybody or anything and therefore they are “happy”. They have no responsibility to anyone or for anyone, so their lives appear free of complications. Although such a life seems ideal-free of distractions and difficulties—it is also insipid and most often useless. Such people live for themselves alone.
Sometimes I am asked if enlightened people have emotions, or should they not remain in a state of blissful Nirvana, uncaring and unaffected by the sea of emotions and suffering all around? Yet, if you look at the lives of the Great Ones—the Buddha, the Christ, Sri Krsna, Rama, Muhammad, Mahavira, and the countless thousands of Saints, ancient and modern—their lives were precisely lives of relatedness. They had Relational Consciousness. They were concerned for people. They cried and agonized over people.
It is true that there are some Saints who enter Nirvana, the Kingdom of God, and become blissfully unaware of Mankind and its problems. They live in their own private world of Bliss and Transcendental Consciousness. They relate to nobody. But such Saints are rare, because the majority of the Great Ones choose relatedness.
If you surrender your ego totally—that is, if you surrender your whole body and mind structure and annihilate all vestige of the personal self in you—then it is possible for you to stay in a relative calm all your life, and at death to become absorbed into the Transcendental Bliss of Nirvana. It is also true, however, that if you choose this Path (the Path of the Pratyeka Buddha or Solitary Mystic), then you have to get away from the world. You have to live alone in a cave or in the desert, or in some lonely spot, and not engage in any human activity. You must remain completely alone, single, solitary, unique. Then your relationship is with the Transcendental alone, with the Absolute, with the Source of your Being.
There have been many Saints who lived like this, both in the East and in the West, but they were never the movers and shakers of civilization. They were not the inspirers of the people. The Great Ones were those who stayed with their people, who had concern for them, who suffered with them, who laughed and cried with them. The Great Ones lived and died for others. It is They who have benefited Humanity. Although they walked with the crowd, they were not of the crowd. Although they lived in the world, they were not of the world.
It's a good point, and I also want to say that those saints who spend all their time focusing on the transcendent are not without relativity. They still are alive and such, but they are ignoring the relative aspects of existence. While it's certainly true that there's nothing wrong with that, it seems that acting in the world has amazing integrating effects. What I find is that acting in the world actually takes all the messy relative things that people don't want to deal with and makes them perfectly safe. From that point of view of unshakeable safety on the most fundamental level, the same experience of Absolute comes available in day to day life, only in a more concentrated fashion, which is in addition to the holistic context of Absolute that everything is bathed in either way.
To be able to go through the whole range of human emotions and appreciate it all as every bit as much the same wholeness people avoid those things to find is an unspeakably cool way of existing. It's that same experience concentrated a million fold. Perhaps more. After all, how does one compare the same amount of infinite that's doubled or tripled it's density? It's infinitely more. Well beyond infinitely more.
Anyway, I appreciate you posting this excerpt....