The ātman overlaps the physical eyes, that is, the mind reveals itself as material (just as matter reveals itself as mental, though in truth it is the dichotomy between mind and matter that is an illusion). One could say, updating the Tantric descriptions, that it is the seeing of the directions toward and from the past or toward and from the future of single “entities” or situations, or also the seeing of one scene with another scene superimposed upon it, or seeing from multiple points of view simultaneously, or seeing above the ideal direction that renders the picture meaningful or indicates what end is immanent in it (but in fact the Tantra do not report images so schematic and simplistic, and if they are spoken here it is as metaphors whose explicit banality prevents the calculating mind—however cunning it may be—from reducing them to what is already known). All these would be, precisely, the dimension of reality anterior to perceiving it as limited to the three dimensions that the eyes of flesh see and the clouded brain elaborates; it would not be a “more”, but would be that a “less” is the ordinary condition of representation—this is what the revealed texts say. They would be, that is, interpenetrations—perceived more or less occasionally—of the Brahman into the ātman, which would do nothing other than render the intrinsic potential fullness of the phenomena that have impressed or do impress the retina.
In effect, there are two modalities of Tantric seeing: one more “organic”, emanated from the Cakra, the other more “psychic”, an emanation in śūnyatā; but of course they have the same nature and psycho-organic matrix, which is the ātman. A further metaphor—of a psychoanalytic type—would be to call it the interacting with one’s own hypostases of the ātman, understood precisely as current sub-manifestations of the ātman in particular “I’s”. These are not “voices”, nor ordinary thoughts, nor dialogues with oneself, nor variations of consciousness as interpreter; they are rather like the helpers of K. in Kafka’s The Castle or the shadow and similar “characters” in Murakami’s novels or certain figures in Swedish films—except that they are known to be oneself in the form of personae. They are—that is, on the condition that one recognizes them as such, namely as particular I’s (whereas most speak of them while undergoing their influence as if they were independent characters arisen by chance in the pen)—autonomous ironies of the multiple activities; not merely dialogues with other independent “I’s”, as in playing chess alone by alternating a white move and a black move, where each move is always perfectly, within Elo limits, played with detachment. This is indeed a profoundly Western metaphor, derived precisely from the I which sees its favored inclinations, and which necessarily remain unexpressed in daily conversation, conversing among themselves in spare moments—something that might serve to indicate, one supposes, incidental manifestations of the ātman still unknown to the subject, for the purpose of promoting in him the realization that he is a “titanic I” only if he wishes to believe it, letting himself be dragged by the current or by prose. That is, one simply wishes to say that these “hypostases” can be counted among the “yawns of Kuṇḍalī” of which the Tantra often speak: all human beings are the ātman—that is, they are buddha—but they sleep blissfully upon the nature of mind. The ātman gives them hints which are systematically ignored; these hints may be “physical” or “psychic”. Noticing them and adding them up by itself serves nothing if one does not then find oneself psycho-organically in the “other side” through the occurrence of grace; but indeed they are hints, and clearly ignoring the hint means renouncing grace, because if grace gives itself through hints, it means that to the person to whom it gives hints it will not occur by itself; this is tautological.
One of the canonical attitudes of the higher consciousness received by the yogī through the Ājñā-cakra is seeing from above, which is echoed in the kathorān with which Plato in the Sophist designates the divine philosophers; but the very “ideas”, it is clear from what Plato writes, he saw in this manner. The presence of direction may perhaps have been glimpsed, in eidetic flash, by Aristotle himself, who then reduced it to that most rational final cause he delineated as the logical crowning of the system of causes—although in fact the Aristotelian telos appears altogether to have been contrived computationally.
In any case, the Tantra say, it is only this activity of the ātman that allows reality to be created with the mind, or rather that effectively and directly creates with the mind.
Given this tide of premises, one may finally say that the ātman makes the mind see reality as it is, and this causes the mind to act upon reality: these are two moments both of “creation”, and it is obvious that such is called “creation” only with respect to the ordinary mind, which does not see reality in its completeness; but precisely this is not a “more”, since it is a “less” that constitutes the ordinary condition of representation, whereas in itself, from the point of view of the yogī, this “creation” is simply acting spontaneously while knowing integral reality, which as such is devoid of the categories of subject and object and of temporal partitioning—such is the “intermediate level of Tantra”; then at the higher levels things are deeper and more complex.
This is the crucial aspect if one wishes to describe it with respect to the phenomenal; at the “psychological” level, the sole and unique end of the “intermediate level of Tantra” is spontaneously realizing spontaneity, living naturalness—there does not even arise the thought of thinking about it, because thinking about it would be unnatural. It is the entering into the condition in which mental creations, miracles, synchronic events, fortunes, misadventures, are spontaneously “perfect”, natural extrinsications of the Brahman as one “creates” it—the life is līlā: divine pastime. Not at all ingenuousness, astonishment, ataraxic beatitude or suchlike, but rather the opposite: not passivity, but “creating”—being demiurges, one may say.
Creating with the mind must be emphasized as not being creating ex nihilo (but in fact none of the gods of the sacred texts creates ex nihilo); instead, it is an “inter-acting” in Kárman effectively through discriminating viveka; it is “ontologically” making-to-be the possibilities one wishes to make be, on condition that they can be, it is a focusing of luminosity within possibilities—now making something shine forth, now drawing something from penumbra. Creating does not mean necessarily obtaining, at least not at the intermediate level of Tantra; but this is already implicit in saying that the ātman is the Brahman.
The aspect difficult to render effectively in words is that this creating pertains solely to the ātman, not to the I: the life of each person is, mutatis mutandis, a grasping of opportunities that chance offers, but the “creating” of the yogī is not this; it is rather a spontaneous act that is simultaneously intentional and unknowing—and by no means should one understand “intentional” as the act and “unknowing” as its consequences; if anything, it is paradoxically the opposite. In effect, the notion that most properly describes the condition of the yogī is the prophetic one: “creating with the mind” is not reducible to discursive thought; if one must use a word to describe it asymptotically, the word is prophecy.
Prophecy is a word that does not appear in the Tantra, simply because it would be superfluous: the ātman is the Brahman, individual consciousness is universal consciousness, that is to say—just as the Tantra repeat incessantly—that Kuṇḍalī is the goddess of language, this being her epithet princeps. Prophecy indeed means etymologically “to speak on behalf of” (Greek pro-phēmi): the nevi’im of the Hebrew Bible do not predict the future, but “simply” through them YHWH speaks, as in fact the first and most important of the Hebrew prophets is Mosheh, the one through whom YHWH created the people of Israel, without Mosheh ever having foretold ex nihilo events that would occur in the future. (The notion of prophet as predictor of the future was created later by Christian scholars for the purpose of identifying in the Hebrew books an announcement of the coming of the Christ, and this idea has sedimented into common language.) And the prophetic Qabbalah of Abulafia is such because to the event of the expansion of the inner light in the mind there follows being animated by the Divine, not the seeing of future events; and in the same manner the archaic Greek prophets, like Pherecydes, were not giving visions of the future by inspiration or intuition, but rather they knew the causes “of the past” and thus “the present”, and consequently said how “the future” would unfold.
“Creating with the mind” is prophecy insofar as it is being an instrument of the higher Consciousness; the fact that this includes within itself both the so-called past and the so-called future is part of its essence: the Brahman is precisely “the All,” the limits of space and time are phantoms created by representation, and the ātman is the Brahman. If the Tantra and the Vedanta do not employ the word prophecy or an equivalent, it is because it would be a pleonasm: if the ātman is the higher Consciousness, there is no sense in specifying that it includes events pertaining to what is ordinarily called the future. Creating with the mind is prophetic because it is an acting from outside the three times; it is neither planning nor manipulating; therefore one must say that it is as intentional as it is unknowing, because if one analyses this state of consciousness, so one must say. The language of which Kuṇḍalī is the goddess is this: it is pre-theoretical language unfolded in its creative power, as Śakti is the power of Śiva; it is neither witty discourse nor purely visionary utterance; the language that creates is the mind in the ātman, not a saying or thinking which, being immaterial, obviously cannot create anything.
This the texts state explicitly, in terms that are “revealed” inasmuch as they spring from individuals who also are the ātman; if they seem not understandable, it is because the reader reads in them no more than what he already knows, but the “revealed” terms are certainly more adequate than any analytic illustration of them. Thus, for example, “Great Perfection” is the literal meaning of the word Dzogchen, which is the further level beyond Tantra insofar as it integrates the perfection of creating, whereas līlā is the term proper to the condition of the avatāra, from Kṛṣṇa to Śrī Anandamayī Mā: the Dzogchen speaks mostly of how to direct toward attaining the higher conditions, whereas in līlā one has always been in them; but in both cases these are variations of the natural state. At other times the texts express the fulfillment of the “intermediate state of Tantra” indirectly or ironically, as in the yogī who meditated reciting mantra on the mālā and at a certain point threw the mālā away and went off. All the foregoing arrives here, and if arriving here has been despairing rather than instantaneous, it is because one is as one is; this is the basis of pure yoga—the yajña of the Ṛgveda is devoid of internal “junctures”, so one might say; the hymns of the Ṛṣi give no hint of distinguishing phases in a substantial sense, because seeing phases already depends solely on beginning from the falsifying schemes of representation.
Attempting to cast all this in current philosophical terms, one may put it thus: reality is also created through the re-interpreting of the past and the pre-interpreting of the future, in a kind of ontological hermeneutics (so it seems one may define the best exegesis of Nietzsche and Heidegger as Vattimo describes it—from within the limits of representation), or poietics. But such a definition, if taken as philosophical, that is, conceptual, would be deficient inasmuch as it is purely dual, mechanistic, and not spontaneous, because at root it is ignorant of the effectiveness of the natural mind anterior to the wandering of thoughts.
The Tantra may well be only poetry or autosuggestion, but the revealed texts set forth the substance as “neuroplastic”: realizing oneself to be the ātman outside time is an effect caused by the instantaneous or induced alteration of biological-nervous capacities. Perhaps the prejudice that separates the Sanātana dharma from common thought is that the latter distinguishes the nervous system into voluntary and involuntary and believes both to be only what empirical and calculating reason knows them to be, whereas Sacred Science says there are other nervous dimensions unknown to the senses and to scalpels—or perhaps merely a living of the nervous systems not as represented and at times representing entities, but according to their own intimate nature; this, and nothing else, would be the Cakra: plexuses of “nervous” energies (prāṇa) whose activation by the ascent of Kuṇḍalī brings about that emergence of physical inner light which in turn implies the evolution of consciousness, indifferently definable as return to one’s true nature, overcoming representation, or ascent to higher worlds.
This is the practical ground—an irreplaceable precondition—of operative sapiential systems: there is a purely mental and consciousness-based part, and a purely nervous and experimental part, the one the mirror of the other and in fact the same thing, prāṇa. The knowledge of this psycho-organic condition, the vidyā, is therefore knowledge by effective mastery: it is of no use to read, accumulate notions, weave concepts, or revel in pathetic intuitions; rather, it concerns transmutation; or rather, certainly reading is also useful, but it depends on how one reads, that is, on what one sees as one reads. To return to the metaphor of the hypostases of the ātman, it is precisely they who see the pre-theoretical “images” written in words, the psycho-neurological mechanisms implied, and the beyond-egoic states of consciousness, and sometimes they present them to the I as it reads; at other times, once acquired, they carry them out and unravel them, weaving and reconnecting them with others in their dark chambers, and then offer the mind “holograms” perfected—this too would be the language of which Kuṇḍalī is goddess.
This would indeed be the master key: the brain appropriates these holograms and “installs” them, making the neurological content of them operative. The Tantra do not say literally that the brain can enact in itself what it learns of itself, but this is the substance of Tantra: generative neuroplasticity.
According to the texts, one must be predisposed to this, or else it is simply a matter of realizing what one has always been or can be, of how one’s mind functions or may function; and to realize this, it is necessary that the event of mental light and subsequent experience of emptiness occur either by itself or through forcible means (kuṇḍalinī-yoga or gtum-mo). (Thus the word “neuroplastic” is said in analogy with current clinical terminology, also because it is not so much a matter of the encephalon as of “subtle energies” located also within the encephalon.)
To reduce the Upaniṣad and the Tantra to philosophies (as Western academics, Hindu paṇḍit, and Buddhist philosophers do) is plainly to ignore their substance, for the Upaniṣad and the Tantra are the practical and effective surpassing of the representative mind, whereas philosophies are expressions of the representative mind.
Continue in Part VII