I have been writing lately about the necessity of touching the natural self, to rid yourself of anything that serves to block or limit the expression of the true primal being that is you. I explained that so many religions of the world have had us tied up in knots. Its really quite a funny scene what we have done to ourselves. In the midst of this I touched upon a catch word of the tantric movement, one which, because I am so poorly read on other traditions, I knew nothing about. Not consciously at least.
Belief is a very funny thing. There is no other thing in our lives that we examine less yet rules over us so powerfully. We take on belief from our family, from our institutions, and rarely do we ever seek to really look at them before taking them on. We slip them on and wear them and then it winds up wearing us. We think more about the food we eat than the beliefs we believe.
So imagine with me for a moment a situation where your body and the body of nature was put here to be perfect. Everything in it served a divine purpose. Your sex drive, your wishes, your deepest desires.....your hunger and your anger....all of these things fit into the natural order as part of actually leading you to the One. But then someone came along and decided that nature was not to be trusted, but dominated, controlled. People, instead of listening to their deeper feelings, cut themselves off from this world, and in so doing, their connection to the divine within them. As this march progressed, people came up with beliefs, silly notions about how the world works. One of these was that the body was foul, a steaming cespool of evil. In fact, the body could be invaded by evil spirits and cause you to be totally lost. Then, these same people began to say that there was a lake of fire that you would go to after you died if you weren't good enough to ignore your deeper darker desires. If you fell into lusting in the body, it was sure that you would go to hell. At this point, what we wound up doing was assuring that the path to awakening was all but impossible. The garment of shame and fear had been laid upon each of us as parent instilled in their children that all of these feelings were to be subdued, pushed down and locked in a cage. Each generation, so filled with these beliefs, would now dutifully hand down the handicap to each succeeding generations. All we really ever needed to do was to listen to ourselves. This was the rise of the priest culture, a male dominated world that mistrusted the feminine. This also meant nature. The feminine was seen as being embodied by the earth. She was everywhere and she HAD to be controlled or else anarchy would prevail. Women were controlled, nature was controlled. The human race became like a tiger locked in a cage.
When you lock a tiger in a cage, you will find that this creature becomes violent. It is angry. It is where it knows it should not be. Such creatures were meant to be free. You are made to be free. But each of us have had our natural self locked up like this tiger. We say that if we let them out, all hell will break loose, and more than likely, this is true, at least initially. So instead of understanding the tiger in the cage, we continue to keep it there, safely locked up until the light in its eyes dies away and it is but a shell of what it once was. This part of ourselves though, is our path to our divine. Its like a gate keeper to make sure we pass by it in order to know it on our way to the depths of what we are, the miracle that is within us. We have just locked up the divine so that its secrets might never be understood. Not by priest or nun or anyone, let alone the masses. The divine was never a bunch of angels singing on clouds with harps. The divine moves and pulses through every fiber and star. It is in the stones in such a way that if you could know their inner life, it would make your tremble. We are the lightening, we are the surging surf. We are the leaping of lions and the swooping of birds. We are fleet and full of teeth and claws and cries in the night. Our natural animal nature is not to be loathed and ignored, it is to be used to learn from, to arise with, and to ascend. We do not need a religion, for the devotion is hidden within us just beneath where the caged tiger lies. We are not neutered spiritual beings devoid of anything but pure thought. We are fantastically alive the way Whitman was alive in his writings. Give me the cathedrals of grass and stone, let the birds be my priestesses and the fish my priests. Nature has been untouched by the mind of humankind. All else in humans except its natural self have been formed and turned to the purposes of belief so that we have willingly set our own inner tiger into servitude and imprisonment. The very thing that would lead us to freedom is kept caged.
So we let the tiger go. We feel this rippling tide of sexual energy move through us. Scared, perhaps overcome, we don't know what to do with it. We act out, we do what we were told must be done. We get tangled up in ourselves. We bite a few people. And then we calm down. Then, panting quietly, we learn how to BE in the world. We learn how to let the power ripple through us as we relax into it. It refines us, makes us more. But all along, every single impulse towards desire and fulfillment is not ignored but seen for what it is. Now we are free. Now we can acknowledge all that we are.
What I discovered in my writing about this recently is that in the Hindu tradition they call this riding the tiger. It was a marvelous affirmation, for certainly they knew how it was with this force driving in you. Its there to be strong, but that does not mean it is there to be subdued. It was not designed to cause you to be caged, but to liberate you. And it can do so powerfully. To do this, though, you have to love the liberation and nature more than control. Instead of eschewing sexual expression, we learn to ride it instead of ignoring it. Gone are the days of the celibate priest or nun. The purest form of worship is communion with the god and goddess within ourselves. Creator is not found outside of us, but is through our insides. We thus learn to know the world from the inside out. It could not be so for some in the past because others had to control others' sexuality, our divine drive and movement into awakening by offering us beliefs which we so willing put on.
Anyone so awakened becomes a free person, the most dangerous person to the control meme that the world has ever saw. They see beyond the mirage of mass conceptualization. They listen to the voice within. No longer is the natural self shelved or hidden, but used as the central sacrament. It is refined into a flame of great desire that can be used in every aspect by the self. It can drive genius, discoveries, inspiration, art and science. It gets you engaged and passionate and in the flow of the universe. It is a distillation of the stars, a ferment from the fruit. It leads one not to freedom FROM nature but freedom within nature. None of this is a denial of nature, but a celebration OF nature. There was never anything to fear.
So we let the tiger free. It rampages for a bit until it frees itself of years of pent up aggression and frustration. But its a new day, and the old way is fading fast. As we look back on how churches demonized the pagan ways which just happened to trust in nature, a pattern emerges. If anyone can get you not to trust yourself, they can offer up an alternative. When people become that interested in your spiritual life like that, you need to wake up and smell the tantric java.
You have never been dirty or rotten or sinful. Your nature was designed to work perfectly. It is time to awake from shame and guilt and the mass hysteria that has been bred into so many. Our bodies are perfect. Now comes the challenge that you must meed before you can know this all through you; you must begin to put it into action.
Just saying it could even make it happen.
Belief is a very funny thing. There is no other thing in our lives that we examine less yet rules over us so powerfully. We take on belief from our family, from our institutions, and rarely do we ever seek to really look at them before taking them on. We slip them on and wear them and then it winds up wearing us. We think more about the food we eat than the beliefs we believe.
So imagine with me for a moment a situation where your body and the body of nature was put here to be perfect. Everything in it served a divine purpose. Your sex drive, your wishes, your deepest desires.....your hunger and your anger....all of these things fit into the natural order as part of actually leading you to the One. But then someone came along and decided that nature was not to be trusted, but dominated, controlled. People, instead of listening to their deeper feelings, cut themselves off from this world, and in so doing, their connection to the divine within them. As this march progressed, people came up with beliefs, silly notions about how the world works. One of these was that the body was foul, a steaming cespool of evil. In fact, the body could be invaded by evil spirits and cause you to be totally lost. Then, these same people began to say that there was a lake of fire that you would go to after you died if you weren't good enough to ignore your deeper darker desires. If you fell into lusting in the body, it was sure that you would go to hell. At this point, what we wound up doing was assuring that the path to awakening was all but impossible. The garment of shame and fear had been laid upon each of us as parent instilled in their children that all of these feelings were to be subdued, pushed down and locked in a cage. Each generation, so filled with these beliefs, would now dutifully hand down the handicap to each succeeding generations. All we really ever needed to do was to listen to ourselves. This was the rise of the priest culture, a male dominated world that mistrusted the feminine. This also meant nature. The feminine was seen as being embodied by the earth. She was everywhere and she HAD to be controlled or else anarchy would prevail. Women were controlled, nature was controlled. The human race became like a tiger locked in a cage.
When you lock a tiger in a cage, you will find that this creature becomes violent. It is angry. It is where it knows it should not be. Such creatures were meant to be free. You are made to be free. But each of us have had our natural self locked up like this tiger. We say that if we let them out, all hell will break loose, and more than likely, this is true, at least initially. So instead of understanding the tiger in the cage, we continue to keep it there, safely locked up until the light in its eyes dies away and it is but a shell of what it once was. This part of ourselves though, is our path to our divine. Its like a gate keeper to make sure we pass by it in order to know it on our way to the depths of what we are, the miracle that is within us. We have just locked up the divine so that its secrets might never be understood. Not by priest or nun or anyone, let alone the masses. The divine was never a bunch of angels singing on clouds with harps. The divine moves and pulses through every fiber and star. It is in the stones in such a way that if you could know their inner life, it would make your tremble. We are the lightening, we are the surging surf. We are the leaping of lions and the swooping of birds. We are fleet and full of teeth and claws and cries in the night. Our natural animal nature is not to be loathed and ignored, it is to be used to learn from, to arise with, and to ascend. We do not need a religion, for the devotion is hidden within us just beneath where the caged tiger lies. We are not neutered spiritual beings devoid of anything but pure thought. We are fantastically alive the way Whitman was alive in his writings. Give me the cathedrals of grass and stone, let the birds be my priestesses and the fish my priests. Nature has been untouched by the mind of humankind. All else in humans except its natural self have been formed and turned to the purposes of belief so that we have willingly set our own inner tiger into servitude and imprisonment. The very thing that would lead us to freedom is kept caged.
So we let the tiger go. We feel this rippling tide of sexual energy move through us. Scared, perhaps overcome, we don't know what to do with it. We act out, we do what we were told must be done. We get tangled up in ourselves. We bite a few people. And then we calm down. Then, panting quietly, we learn how to BE in the world. We learn how to let the power ripple through us as we relax into it. It refines us, makes us more. But all along, every single impulse towards desire and fulfillment is not ignored but seen for what it is. Now we are free. Now we can acknowledge all that we are.
What I discovered in my writing about this recently is that in the Hindu tradition they call this riding the tiger. It was a marvelous affirmation, for certainly they knew how it was with this force driving in you. Its there to be strong, but that does not mean it is there to be subdued. It was not designed to cause you to be caged, but to liberate you. And it can do so powerfully. To do this, though, you have to love the liberation and nature more than control. Instead of eschewing sexual expression, we learn to ride it instead of ignoring it. Gone are the days of the celibate priest or nun. The purest form of worship is communion with the god and goddess within ourselves. Creator is not found outside of us, but is through our insides. We thus learn to know the world from the inside out. It could not be so for some in the past because others had to control others' sexuality, our divine drive and movement into awakening by offering us beliefs which we so willing put on.
Anyone so awakened becomes a free person, the most dangerous person to the control meme that the world has ever saw. They see beyond the mirage of mass conceptualization. They listen to the voice within. No longer is the natural self shelved or hidden, but used as the central sacrament. It is refined into a flame of great desire that can be used in every aspect by the self. It can drive genius, discoveries, inspiration, art and science. It gets you engaged and passionate and in the flow of the universe. It is a distillation of the stars, a ferment from the fruit. It leads one not to freedom FROM nature but freedom within nature. None of this is a denial of nature, but a celebration OF nature. There was never anything to fear.
So we let the tiger free. It rampages for a bit until it frees itself of years of pent up aggression and frustration. But its a new day, and the old way is fading fast. As we look back on how churches demonized the pagan ways which just happened to trust in nature, a pattern emerges. If anyone can get you not to trust yourself, they can offer up an alternative. When people become that interested in your spiritual life like that, you need to wake up and smell the tantric java.
You have never been dirty or rotten or sinful. Your nature was designed to work perfectly. It is time to awake from shame and guilt and the mass hysteria that has been bred into so many. Our bodies are perfect. Now comes the challenge that you must meed before you can know this all through you; you must begin to put it into action.
Just saying it could even make it happen.
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