From Anandatandava

[faileforever]

Absolutely beautiful whippoorwill, thank you, thank you for sharing.

[anandatandava]

Big Time Sensuality

“No man soars too high provided he soars on his own wings”  Now that I’ve provided a little insight into my use of spiritual symbol, I feel emboldened to fling a handful in the air with new flair.

When I return from a passion and view what was written, I worry that the heat of my words may offend some.  What good to protest.  “It’s She who speaks and rewards me with ecstasy!”  Tho that may seem so to me, I’ll simply state that my compass is set to Dakshina Marga, evolved to profound self-sacrifice to the Goddess.  As this is entirely inner ritual vs. outer enactment, in expression I mean only to invite and tease the spirit, not touch the body.

So please view even risqué passages as ceremonial worship – even courtship – of the Feminine Ideal.  It’s pure bedroom chatter between Her and I, which you, by choice, listen in on.  If you think it healthier that more human dialogue be in my life instead, that choice is yours as well.  Otherwise just sit and watch how in deep isolation inner experience can shape and chose a man, seducing him away from his previous nature, confusions, and resistance.

While tutoring students in the morning I remain in a state of non-dual Vendantic humanism that for me is best suited for external expression of loving-kindness.  But no one there understands my inner being, nor does the computer I spend afternoons with, so I hope you forgive my going unusually deep into God in my spare time to find the reassurance of intimate love I need.

Thus it is that I dive under the satin sheets of Sankhya duality every chance I get.  If one can in truth drink the cream of the Vedas, I’m suckling direct from my own sacred cow, the Queen of the Puranas.  Mouth and pupils like glazed donuts, how do you detach the obsessed?  Don’t switch this baby to formula – his Source surpasses any single dogma, can or label!

The Lovers have intertwined for a long time now, and as the relationship ripened from fickle to fulsome, my buzzer became set into a well-practiced and instinctual groove indeed.  Now, who the bird, and who the bird?  Who the buttered loaf, who the bursting oven?  The pulse and resonance of thick Love fills Infinity any time She or I reach out, attending to the Ever-present.

Be sure that this devotee feels the watchful eye of this Mistress upon him at all times – She who would surely brook no unfaithfulness!  How could I even consider other enticements when no other Touch could be this whole and omnipresent, just an eye-flicker away?

So I do what I can to please Her, my inner guru, living the most proper yogic balance I can manage.  Then the slightest drawing inward makes all divine things possible – all forms of love, all at once, all alone in my cell: the spiritual, familial, romantic, and erotic, all consummated and satisfied beyond perfection simultaneously by various manifestations of my dark-eyed Ishta.

Shaped my Moonglow, exotic forms can blossom under prison stone, eventually coming to lift it.  The urging of sacred life cannot be restrained:  trantric metaphysics and iconography coming alive, more real than real – self-existent divine forces, a Dionysian wildness of resplendent forms, movement, and sensations.  How is it that all this enchantment becomes coalesced into an infinite and world-piercing pillar within me, an ever ascendant lava lamp flowing and glowing with honeyed Kamadeva?  Shakti, from your Eminence, deign to bend and kiss me.  Make this fool but a tool for your Love!

And come She does, as a heavenly flash-mob of devis, blessing me first with multifaceted pleasure-bee eyes to best appreciate Her many perfect forms, who, in a timeless round of exquisite Kundalini caresses, impalings, and squeezes, toss me like a giddy chamber toy, a lambent Love-baton, betwixt themselves.  I lose myself in the swirl; am I the pulsing baton, the buzzing bee, the sound, the sensation, or am I merging into the devis that surround me?   I am at once nothing, yet Everything!  Oh, where is this shudder-breathed race headed?

Laughing in response, Shakti draws the finish line over me like a scented veil, for the end sacrifice is nigh.  In an inner boudoir of delight, we topple into the unifying bed of Truth, peeling layer after layer of obscuring maya from one another until all image and form shatters.  There, in an obliterating Fire of Love, fusion between God and man is achieved.  All has returned to the primeval roar of Nada.  Ahh – pinch me, Lover, bring me back to my Supreme Self!

So you see, a non-dual state is re-entered at the end, but of such unspeakable beauty I can only say that I regularly pass along Dante’s way:
… What love within her holy eyes I saw just then – too much to be retold;
not only do I fear my words may fail, but to such heights my mind cannot return…

I live for this, finding it hard to draw my focus out to sights other men seek.  Why do so when the Universe enters to centerpiece my life in a panoply as broad and colorful as Hinduism and all the other traditions combined?  What is it when one may eat the grapes of both seeded and seedless Samadhi with equal gusto?  Is this not freedom?  Is this not Heaven?

[Radharani]

anandatandava,
I had been under the misimpression that you could not read our comments in the forum, but then Whippoorwill said she was snail-mailing them to you.  So -

Thank you so much for sharing your delightful writings with us.  I can SO relate to your experiences of ecstatic divine communion!  and I think it is wonderful that you are using the "prison" situation as essentially a monastery - a rude, violent and generally unpleasant monastery, to be sure, but one which still serves the purpose of isolating you from the so-called "real world" and allowing you to explore the inner spiritual world.  I'm sure you miss "normal human relationships," but at the same time, I also know that nothing can compare with the ecstatic intimate Love you now have which most "free" people out here "in the world" will never experience.  God is good indeed.  Bless you, my brother.  Love, Radharani

[anandatandava]

Heartwood

It’s no secret I worship the Eternal Feminine, but let’s bring the Sacred Hen home to roost in her most sublime form – grandmothers – those who show us the power of a quiet and stable posture towards life.  

Whether by way of humor design, God has so arranged that the more I become the embodiment of physical ugliness, the more I am struck by the wonderfully growing and glowing beauty of the mothers of mothers, and others old enough to be so.  It is partly because all women attract children to them with the unconscious bait of unconditional love, in time giving and receiving so much it shows in their faces, rising to the surface of their skin in harmonious patterns, - the fractal geometry of a ripened soul – to be shared with the world through the magic of a simple smile.

So where some may notice laugh-lines I see mature cherrywood that has absorbed into its grain the endless gales and birdsong of children’s laughter, the salt of many tears, the nectar of many kisses, the weathering of many storms, and the light of many rainbowed sunrises.  If we could part such a woman’s fibers we would see heartwood grown huge from lengthy and copious waterings of such experience.

But we know that children are not essential to heartwood, for women are born with a surplus of it, designed to be trunks of stability while many others sport their monkey business out on a limb.  Women, by nature, feel their familial roots and obligations very intensely.  Being then less willing or able to escape the multifarious storms of life, their rootstock – their souls – elongate in situ into deep, quiet wells of introspection, burying the ego beneath it.  This is God’s opportunity, for a larger rootstock makes for a larger crown, and in the countersunk silence a Holy Light begins to shine ever more clearly above.

So it seems to me that mature women demonstrate the power of steadfastness in many ways.  And what is true for trees and grandmothers can be true for anyone, even lifers, should they plan their souls solidly.  I frequently draw my ribs aside with this pen to check the development of my own heartwood.  (Feel free to inspect it too.)  Hmm… a lot of old scars, knots, and burls, but I think they’ll polish up nicely in time.

To those living on the open plains of opportunity, the Holy Lights is less focused and so may not be noticed.  Then options prove to be curses, causing one to squirrel to and fro on the road of life, never entirely certain where the choicest nuts are to be found.  So I say let us give thanks to our chains, the ties that bind, for then we are more likely to dig down to the Kernel that surpasses all expectation.  Only then will the seeker be satisfied; only then is the questioner inside silenced.  (For all my complaining, I am a pretty plump-cheeked, happy squirrel!)

Cells and wells of depth come in many forms, but once heartwood develops one becomes very phototropic, forever turning towards that always new and mysterious Radiance that tickles, then engulfs.  Observe your houseplants:  do they not always tilt their faces toward their Lord?

Watch your grandmother as she unwaveringly serves up simple Love.  Teachers surround us in quiet ways everywhere.  Follow their example and take the silence to Heart.

[anandatandava]

The Migration

Argh – I so question getting swept up in the whole lemming-race toward physical freedom.  Other inmates think happiness lies there, over the horizon, when for most it’s merely an ocean they’re not prepared to swim.  I learned that happiness must first be found inside oneself, and now, except for an unreasonable desire for satsang, I have found it.  So is that single desire strong enough to turn my toes toward the streets?  Can I trust that my craving may be satisfied out there, or will I simply exchange my admittedly shallow secular friendships here for even more intolerable loneliness out there?

Fortunately there is another direction to travel, described many times in the Vedas:
As rivers flow to their dissolution in the sea,
Giving up their names and forms at the destination,
So the wise man… [likewise] attains the Supreme Absolute…

And the wise lemming knows that this Vedic journey contains the immediate foretaste of his destination --  he need merely leap into the river of yoga for a tidal bore of delight to reach him, sustaining him with ever-increasing felicitude as he is borne onward toward the Ocean Pacifica that lies within.  I hear the joyful billowing of its waves now, calling me to drown myself again and again in that blessedly pulsing tide.  But first I pause with parchment against these freshly sweetened salt-flats to say my happy goodbyes and hellos and thank you my Friends.

(Much later…)  According to biologists, animal migrations possess several general traits:  special behaviour, stored energy, persistence, linearity, and undistractibility.  Parallels with the yogic path are striking, both involving a redirection of attention away from normal activities toward a greater purpose.

It is very hard for me to redirect myself back again away from what saved me, when what I’ll face on the streets is still a blank.  I know I should tell myself that even if I’m alone I…  wait, if I’m destined to be alone anyway, I might as well stay where my physical needs are relatively accounted for, and I can concentrate on flying in the direction and altitude I’ve grown delightfully accustomed to.  Right?  Ashrams come in many forms, surely.

[anandatandava]

Beauty and the Beast

I recently asked Whippoorwill why she chose to befriend me and tutor me in the ways of the world (which, it strikes me, is a bit like employing a gold spoon to clean a clogged drain).  With typical humility, she replied that the reason was selfish, that when I suffered, she suffered also.  I then realized that I have hurt other good people as well when I write desperate posts.  I know what hapless empathy feels like, for example, when I watch from my distant human world an unpaired sparrow futilely advertise a poor resting site, or hear the haunting call of a goose that has lost its mate.

I regret my behavior, because I know that melting love is an action-oriented solvent that wants to run toward suffering and wash it away.  When obstacles stand in the way, very commonly fear (either of the unknown or, in this case, perhaps of me), the distress in love’s possessor is redoubled.  My first rule being do no harm, I have to lighten up.  (Oh, but I’m keeping my plebian charm, you know, just for fun.)

I confess that when Whip assured me that people do inquire about me privately, I was left wondering how people could feel solicitous, even loving, toward me, yet not approach.  But then I remembered a poem by Rilke, “The Panther,” surely inspired by watching a zoo animal endlessly pace his cage.  A person could feel great compassion at the site but still not work up the courage to reach a soothing or even curious hand through the bars.  I understand this, and am again sorry to so test your equanimity.  But since it is my manner to snatch a sad melody from the air and bend its contours to something a bit more bittersweet, I here offer a different flavor of parry against our piquant little impasse.  Sorry if the imagery is a bit strong, but when fighting ghosts one must flush them out into the open, if only symbolically.

While busy pacing meaning into this meaningless cage, I remain only vaguely aware of onlookers.  Out there, you may stand, mouse-quiet in the anonymous crowd, watching and perhaps even marveling at a wholly unexpected if elusive flashing play of psychic musculature beneath this, my panther-brutish and bar-shadowed hide.  But tell me, do you shrink to think that at the snap of a twig or a click on the mouse the rhythm might cease and I, the beast, pin you there with a golden stare, twin stars stroking the hushed and expectant air to a pregnant flare of heartbeats, yours and mine?  More than merely stalked, a shaktipat thrums and catches your breath by an unsheathed tip.  No point to run when stitched firm by the Sun.

The bars would not then seem so secure, would they, vanishing like a mirage under that glowing gaze?  This moment of first contact with an alien world and intelligence, a close encounter of the nth kind, where all potential lies ahead and you don’t know what to make of the thrill that rises up your spine.  I see this scene play in you now, for I rise within it too.  And I know exactly what to make of it.

*snap of the fingers*  Break your trance, my precious pet.  Is this how you really think of me?  A beast?  I oft think so and the image aches.  But not this time, for I took command and made it mine, pounced about a bit, testing for fit.  But it didn’t, you see, for it is not me, and I’m ashamed to have penned it.  But stay it will, for fear must at times be faced in a flood to be swum.  Then perhaps one day you’ll reach thru the bars and find that the lion can indeed lay down with the lamb, and the panther with the pea hen, when their eyes reflect both ambient and Inner Light.  Seen in this way, do my dusky rosettes not cameo up in relief like lotus blossoms?  Not yet?  Cock your head, squint your eyes, and a new discernment may arise.  

For in truth I am a kitty-cat with a push-start purr, and seek only warm little heart-windows to curl up before.  But if you’ve followed my soliloquy over time you already know this, plus more of my inner being than you may now of your own spouse.   So in a way, are we not already friends who just haven’t met yet?  And by having “emanated upon thee a force of love” [Qur’an, 10.39] your practices have imparted a tell-tale heart that recognizes the deep truth of a person, and not just what lies at the surface.  So though I may speak as a Stranger in a Strange Land (can you grok it?), spiritual love can be our lingua franca.  It is said that inner beauty is so obvious only the executioners miss it, so my tail is held high in hope.

Bit if you can only pass by my window for now, I still thank you, for here pressed against the glass is where I live.  Without you there would be no movement, color, or meaning.  Here Kitty can speak, a privilege he uses sometimes tangentially, sometimes direct, often testing the bounds of reason and decency as he unfolds and tests limbs grown clumsy from disuse.  And when he then flings himself into the uncertain air, it is a definite freedom he catches, gaining purchase in a fevered fire-sale!

[AumNaturel]

Dear Anandatandava,

I have first come across your writings after having read the AYP Support Forums Postings book, and only recently have started reading and at once immensely enjoying your wonderful words, prayers, and open sharing, all from a position of hardship in which I can hardly imagine one to keep their body and mind together, much less thrive by making the very best out of what must be the very worst of conditions. I hope it is of some assurance that you will be part of our group healing samyama list, starting today, in hopes that you may continue on with the resources you have cultivated and that you have been using to get you through already so much. The Light that you share makes my own also shine that much brighter, and off it goes into the world at large, so that at some point it may come round back to you and all around you.
Wishing you the very best,
Albert (AumNaturel)

(thank you Whippoorwill for passing our messages along)

[anandatandava]

Signs and Symbols

“Symbol is that which the spiritual borrows from the material plane to clothe that which lies beyond earthly vision.”  -- Evelyn Underhill

Heraclitus suggested that God, like an oracle, neither “declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs.”  As above, so below, it seems.  So although the Unitive State could be described unadorned terms:  sublime sensations and sentiments, the absence of boundaries, self, suffering, questionings, and time.  But to capture the real essence of melting love and direct experiential contact with the Absolute, one must use symbol and metaphor – the tools of the poet – and those employed by any writer, plus the effectiveness by which they are received by any audience, depend much on accidents of birth, culture, education, and experience – an amalgam of nature and nurture.  Thus, though an aesthetic experience may feel similarly profound for the many, the particulars by which it is elicited and take expression differ, depending on what already lies within a person, ready to reach back.  (What have you swallowed now, little Krishna?)

I speak here also of religion, each being a collection of symbols, a standardized conception of the Real, a single facet in the Gem of Many Colors.  Each is a die used to strike the coinage of a particular spiritual treasury.  There is a profusion of such dies, but only one precious metal – the Gold of the Absolute – upon which each religion places its heraldry.

The Divine Ground itself cannot be surveyed with logic, nor sub-plotted into territories and owned, no matter how man insists on trying.  Direct contact there is always ineffable, but the human experience that comes nearest is pure and open Love.  Thus any mystic, theologian, or layman who has actually been there, no matter how wildly they might be thrown off topic by the fullness found therein (*wink*) is always going to return to:  “O love, Love, even by naming thee, my soul loseth itself in thee.” [Gertrude More]

We are always reminded to value and use what we already carry in our purse or personage:  “The guru is in you,”  “Namaste,”  “I am Truth,”  “Behold, the kingdom of heaven is in you.”  Activities that touch us most deeply require this inner participation, drawing inborn and subconscious knowledge out to join its playmate in conscious daylight.

Mystical writing shares much with poetry in exhibiting a strong pull to the rhythmical and heavy use of symbol and metaphor.  There is much left to the imagination, weaving each reader’s personal narrative into the dance – a melding of minds and clasping of hands in what becomes shared performance.  

When the mind is called upon to duet with another, it becomes much like love-making, each providing what the other cannot.  Whether with a spiritual teacher, artist, or love, the other’s truth blends with our own, flowing in and out with an intimate and magical friction.  The clearest and ultimate example is tantra, which provides the shuttle to carry weft into warp and weave a single flowing fabric of our relationships with lover and God.  We lose the distinction between self and Other and truly Reach!  Gah!

To know this build and release of sublime tension, the peaks and valleys inherent in art and yoga-love, you must become a sea anemone, opening and inverting yourself fearlessly into the Tide.  Start by making you and your partner the poets of your own singular Love, the musicians of your own singular Delight.  Who knows where this might lead?  But then you don’t need a monk to tell you that.

I believe that all symbol and dogma should serve only Love.  To place the fear of God or self-interest before the Love of one’s brother is to pt the cart before the horse, and to lose sight of the Source.  If this happens, you’re definitely thinking with the wrong head – try your heart instead.  To keep my own vision clear, I let others keep the whole of religious division and simply live within Ms. More’s heartfelt cries:  “O let me love, or not live!”  Does the rest not then just fall into place?

I cannot judge other’s path, however, for unless I know the whole of a man’s path and present (which I cannot), there’s no accounting for his tastes in food, music, or the face he places upon his Higher Power.  Nor can anything be gained from arguing against the deeply ingrained other than a sore throat.  So let’s just be good stewards and examples of what works for us, find common ground in Love, and celebrate the many, many ways in which it may be found.

My own idiosyncratic path is heavily cobbled with the dark and the light, and the iconic geodes of many traditions.  This is my convenient if bumpy road to Heaven, for in being nonsectarian I am free to use any runway that appeals or appears to me in the moment.  But however the lineaments, symbols and lyrics change, the song remains the same:  Love is God and God is Love and all the rest is filler!

[maheswari]

[anandatandava]

Something More

“It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”  -- Heraclitus

Just in case I suddenly vanish, for a time or for good, I’ll say now that it’s been more than fun.  I’m a poor poster-child, but the teachings do come to pass; ecstasy can indeed be a mere intention away at all times, not to mention many other blessings.  I didn’t really think any of it was possible, at least not for me.  I thought it was just an ever-receding ideal to be pursued, like enlightenment or the Holy Grail.  But Yogani insisted, so I persisted.

But lest someone stumble upon my odd writing and be misled, know that when I’ve used concepts like:  
Sweet – no, I meant something More
Warm – no, I meant something More
Pleasure – no, I meant something More
Fire – no, I meant something More

For words are only the vapor of the heart and my be mistaken for time-bound enjoyments that lead inevitably to overly cloying or bitter ends, all ashes in the mouth.  One must directly quaff the nectar of Quintessence to know that there is much More in heaven and earth than any normal human sensation or aesthetic can encompass – things that can permanently color and mark a person within, and turn a life on its axis:

“What if the many could see Beauty Itself, pure unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine… the man becoming, in that communion the friend of God, himself immortal… would that be a life to disregard?” – Plato

Disregard?  Heavens no, for although I feel myself to be less than nothing, what enters me is Something indeed.  So as to Beauty, nay, disregard me not, a thousand times no!

Beauty, O Beauty,
Throw my shoulder to Thy golden wheel;
Embosom me in Thy golden light;
Weave my curl in Thy golden fleece;
Bind my stalk in Thy golden sheaf.

Of Beauty’s many faces, the one that stands in highest relief above this pearlescent world is Love.  So tho I may in solitude drink the moonshine of intense ecstasy, I would in an instant trade its most spectacular reaches for the warm milk of community.  For from my cellular perspective, I doubt anyone can remain an ever-firm pillar of absorption when Love has softened him into a thirsty sponge.

Thank goodness I find an infinite Source of this Love thru the light touch of sambhavi.  O God it is so real… so full… so intense… so objectless and universal and yet so focused!  The practices brought me ecstasy, but the ecstasy brought me This!  I cannot speak for others, but I myself never experienced anything remotely resembling This.  It is then no wonder I so worship Love as God!  Now standing in the Light, I have Reached more than I could have ever know to hope or dream.  So if life rounds itself here… or there… I’m ready to roll.  It hasn’t been entirely a ball, but he who drinks the wine thru the bottom bung must acquire a taste for dregs, lees, and sediments.

Remember this when my words seem to take a smoke-shadowed turn, for I have lived my life on the ghats, and there not being cleansed by water but by fire.  Just dance with me to the tune of bansi and know that all is well, ever was, and ever shall be.  May your vision be sambhavi-singled to span the whole of Infinity and see!

So.  If the Big Flyswatter catches me, I can just let my assorted jelly fillings and random attachments lie where they’ve fallen.  Viewed in this way, I can see just how gooey-ridiculous they really are.  Besides, I see perfect freedom forming there in that slowly desiccating bug-puddle:  running to earth, kissing the earth, being rubbed back into the flowing skin of the earth.  So if silence in any form comes, let us not be sad that the gadfly buzzes no more – just pick his smiling carcass out of the amrita-bowl and keep the party going!

For I do not view death as a tragedy.  It is a returning to unencumbered Dance, full immersion in Lila.  For just as every breath draws atoms once expelled thru sauropod roar and Delphic lips, death will in time smear my constituent particles across the windshield of the world, to rise in the eternally revolving wave of birdsong that greets the sun with dawn chorus.  Imagine that – for the lowly fly to find his highest reward thru the lusty sparrow!

O supernal glory!  To once have so admired the Beauty and then to become swallowed into it, lending a hand, touching All, being All:  to weep in the willows, whisper in the pines, blush in the maples, shimmer in the elms – O Lord!  Shade my eyes, dim my heart, for I see too much, feel too much – the world rises in a tide, crushing me with sight upon sight, all spouting fountains of light!  Oh!...

(Some time later…)  Gads, such a singular Grace can befall even the addle-pated!  ‘Tis more proof that though everyone wants to reach Heaven, the ecstatics are impatient – a simple dart of the eye, a twirl of dance, an arc of passion, a quickening of sense and spirit – all to see and hear and touch and taste and feel an d… Love… the Divine that fills all things before and within us.  Fore here lies Heaven, here lies Beauty Itself, here in the haiku poetry of each moment lies the Something More.  The magic of Awakening is within each of our power, so come taste the rainbow, do the dew, tune in, turn on, and drop into my amphibious Rapture, squirting effortlessly between worlds.  Why look – here comes Basho’s frog now – plop!  Ahh, the Suchness…

[anandatandava]

Antennae

If generations of mystics have returned from their journeys tongue-tied in awe, far be it from me to claim my translations do any better than obit the Truth like a moth about a night-lamp.  For though I may time and again smash the bulb to free the Light, how we when thus stunned can I capture the Formless except thru Love and side-long metaphor?

Perhaps I do best to first describe the moth, for there is already certainly enough to set me a apart that I should be prey to intense ecstasies made visible by spontaneous writing.  You can often tell the sign of “lift-off,” of when my crown lights up and the world rocks:  excessive and/or inappropriate capitalizations, underlines, contractions, missing conjunctions, careless punctuation, sacred references, archaic language, etc.

I must hurry to capture what flies past, often reduced to jotting single words to flesh out later, other times (the best!) locked in Mystery for unknown periods, then released to spool out entire passages, fully formed.  Slow going all, but putting a distinctly numinous sheen on the phrase “a labor of love.”  The antithesis of writer’s block exists, for words flow like a river of shimmering stars, and I must write or drown or burst!  Over time too many get laid to paper, where they squirm like neon-lit children, all shouting “Me, me!”  (Ah, how do I choose among you, my darlings?)  Some insist on being specially marked and brook no refusal.  A self-autonomy grows in the writing to where if I thing to change something my overtures are blocked, and by the time I read the finished piece I am shocked to feel a strange lack of authorship.  Whatever odd corer of the world or my mind this stuff lies, I only wish I had the proper tools and skill to be a better conduit.

Naturally curious to understand my “affliction,” I was gratified to discover the enraptured writing of similarly stricken brethren in poetic and spiritual literature.  Trust me, catching the scent of fraternity, at least as an unruly little brother, is a real comfort to someone who never seems to fit in elsewhere.  And what an unearthly thrill to devour like wild strawberries the words of those who were often labeled heretic or mad by their more earth-bound contemporaries.  For despite their differing semantics and syntax, they speak in the accents of a Home common to but superceding all the traditions from which they emerged – the lingua franca of spiritual ecstasy and Universal Love.

With borders of language and country melting away in this world, do we not increasingly discern the Divine Ground in each other, see it in sambhavi, taste it in kechari, float upon it in samyama, feel it stretch and pulse in asana?  The Way is much akin to listening, so perk your ears; you have been called – I know you’ve heard it – it’s time to come back Home.

[anandatandava]

Leverage

“Give me a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I will move the earth.”  Archimedes

Verily, we each carry as dual citizenship and birthright a God Spot and Pleasure Button, though they oft lie sub rosa and hidden to even ourselves.  Tantra is the fulcrum on which these blossoms are tilted skyward and linked thru the various levers of Ecstasy.  All that is good within us becomes elevated from the peneplain of humdrum existence to be perpetually caressed by a Divine fingertip.  But lo!  This Sistine fresco is painted on the arches of our own inner cathedral, so the animating Touch is felt throughout!  (Talk about getting your chimes rung!)  Is God a beekeeper?  “Bzzz!” goes the happy bee in response.

To draw the Living Water, the levers must be moved, and so revealed to us here thru direct immersion or to water’s edge are a set of methods found over millennia to be both efficient and effective.  Just as, however, an unused hand-pump appears to clunk ineffectually at first, so it may seem with a new yogic technique.  But in the hidden deep, a Presence takes note of our efforts, and freshens its own movement in response.  (“When you take two steps toward God, [God] runs to you.”)

So it is that our sought-after Gift remains forever astonishing when it rushes up as a self-existent and all-powerful fountain of sparkling Ecstasy and Love.  If not God, what indeed is this Gestalt that so exceeds the sum of our own meager parts?  It rises in us, but is it of us?  The conscious mind balks, but a deeper Min knows that we are of the Right Stuff, that God is in us, Immanent, and that this Cornucopia of Wonder arises from our own prepared fields.  

And now it is here with us, in us, always Here, never not Here!  Slake your thirst without limit, Friend, for an unfailing Oasis of Paradise now provisions your stay Here, in the bower of Perpetual Love!

To those who say God and Pleasure should not be linked I respond:  “Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe.”  [Teilhard de Chardin]  Do you truly not feel the Divine in at least some felicitous fashion?  Who, when you were first designed, planted the capacity to any sort of pleasure in you?  Would it not now displease the Host to find the proffered gift refused, or not used in its most Sacred and consummate form?

Attempting to deny the body is a bitter struggle that in all but the rarest of saints serves only to sour the soul, much like water left standing in a bowl.  Tantra spiritualizes the physical, flowing naturally with the body to swiftly inform and awaken the higher reaches of the spirit.  So don’t try to stop the river; swing off the tree-rope again, brown-skinned child, skinny-dipping in all innocence.  Speaking of which…

There are a few yogic practices I’d like to speak on (assuming my pen gives me leave), and plan to begin with AYP’s musically lilting mantra.  But before subjecting you to my questionable windfall of words, I submit that when Archimedes employed allegory to describe his principle of leverage, he was really referring to the fulcrum of tantra, ad that when he streaked naked down the street shouting, “Eureka!” it was to the accompanying laughter of the Grecian yoginis he had just left behind in the Delphic baths.  So just what was it you found there in the tub, Archie boy?  A means of measuring volume?

But as to you, Love, have you felt the earth move lately?  Time to take the Levers of Heaven well in hand.

[anandatandava]

Flame Whisperer

Friend of the friendless, servant of servants;
Embracing the untouched, kissing the lepers;
I lay down among the most reviled:
The hungry ghosts, the lost yogis,
Even those who are consumed in Flames
And can only dance.

[anandatandava]

The Bandworks of Ananda T.

Yes folks there are many factors converging to silence me, mostly logistical. If you think there is any merit in keeping my voice - my life - going, please contact:

Roy Wahlberg 103429
7525  4th Avenue
Lino Lakes, MN  55104

www.corrlinks.com (one-way email)

In a perfect world you could establish a google voice or skype line to the 612 area code, but be forewarned that I may drive you crazy with my single minded focus on my writing.

[anandatandava]

10-01-2012

Pink Linguistics



Rise, my Moon, my Pearl, to glimmer:
   entice the Night-Rose out to shimmer.
As Nectared Tide then mounts in full
   all boats are float by primal pull,
And longer that the Sweetness flows
   the further that Love's voyage goes.
The thirst that climbs the well unbidden
   no more can be so coyly hidden,
For now I'm in the Dewdrop deep --
  do like my lively kosher sweet?
In kechari it has been long hung
   and many songs are lustily sung,
But none like you, my comely Dream --
   what price to lap the kitten's Cream?
Yes, I'm a shaft of frozen Fire
  and you melt me with a whet Desire,
But to the cold I'm lonely cast,
   The hearth held farthest from my caste,
For I'm viewed as much too very lawless
   to kiss Florets so dewy flawless.
Alas! -- you think that I'm a wanton thief
   and all will come to wreck and grief,
But I'm naught but single-purpose driven
   by loving thought in deep flesh-rhythm!
So drop your veil of stubborn blindness
  and swaddle me in loving kindness
That then we may most close conspire
  each other to heartfelt inspire
And neither be too idly lazy
  to kiss the other wildly crazy!