Philosophy

"The basic tenet of tantra is that all of life is food for spiritual development, from the most mundane tasks of everyday living to the deepest meditation. Tantra teaches to embrace life, to try to strive to see the creator in everything within and around us. The practices including concentration, meditation, yoga postures, relaxation, visualization, nourishing food, community involvement, service, and right conduct, are all designed to help us experience body, mid, spirit, joy, peace, suffering, and pain as changing aspects of one invisible Being."

"In another tradition, five types of tantric lore are distinguished. Siddhanta Jnana (leading to salvation), Garudajnana (removes poison or poison magic), Kamajnana (enables the adept to enforce his will), Bhutatantra (exorcism of demons) and Bhairvatantra (destruction of enemies). This system lays too much stress on the magical side of Tantric literature. A variant is the five-fold series of Siddhanta, Garuda, Ghora, Vama and Bhutantra which together constitute the Five Currents."

"Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential."

"A famous stanza ascribed to the Varaha (sometimes to the non-existent Varaha) Tantra enumerates seven of these [theoretical statements]. Creation, dissolution of the world, worship of the gods, mastery of divine beings, recitation and worship of mantras, execution of six acts of magic, and the four fold practice of meditation. They are said to be characteristics of Agama."

"…denounced only the present corrupted form of Vamachara of the Tantras. I did not denounce the Mother - worship of the Tantras, or even the real Vamachara. The purport of the Tantras is to worship women in a spirit of Divinity. During the downfall of Buddhism, the Vamachara became very much corrupted, and that corrupted form obtains to the present day. Even now the Tantra literature of India is influenced by those ideas. I denounced only these corrupt and horrible practices -- which I do even now. I never objected to the worship of women who are the living embodiment of Divine Mother, whose external manifestations, appealing to the senses have maddened men, but whose internal manifestations, such as knowledge, devotion, discrimination and dispassion make man omniscient, of unfailing purpose, and a knower of Brahman. "[(Sanskrit)]-- she, when pleased, becomes propitious and the cause of the freedom of man" (Chandi, I. 57). Without propitiating the Mother by worship and obeisance, not even Brahma and Vishnu have the power to elude Her grasp and attain to freedom. Therefore for the worship of these family goddesses, in order to manifest the Brahman within them, I shall establish the women's Math."

"Tantra means technique - a technique for the fulfillment of desires. Man has no control over his desires. A desire is claimed as one’s own only after it comes to one’s mind. Desires are products of latent tendencies/vasanas. Through the fulfillment of the desires,‘vasanas’ are eliminated. Tantra provides the methodology whereby, through the fulfillment of one’s desires, liberation is attained. Liberation means understanding one’s own nature. From that understanding, one realizes that the world is nothing but the manifestation of the consciousness of which we are, but only a part. It is also a way of living which provides aesthetic enjoyment and knowledge."

"Vaidika and Tantrika cults have co-existed in Bharath from very ancient period. From that time itself, Tantra was confined to a few people. If the theory and practice of Tantra are understood and accepted widely, there will not be any class difference among human beings."

"Hinduism arrived in last and worst age of medieval development," in which the noble philosophy of the Vedas had been replaced by the obscene sexual perversions and black magic of the left-hand (vamacara) Tantras: "The rites, or rather, orgies, of the left hand worshippers presuppose the meeting of men and woman of all castes in the most unrestrained manner."

"As Tantra Sastra or Agama is not as some seem to suppose, a petty Sastra of no account; one, and an unimportant sample of the multitudinous manifestations of religion in a country which swarms with every form of religious sect. It is on the contrary with Veda, Smrti and Purana one of the fore most important Sastras in India governing, in various degrees and ways, the temple and household ritual of the whole of India today and for centuries past.... Over and above the fact that the Sastra is an historical fact, it possesses, in some respects, an intrinsic value which justifies its study. Thus it is the store house of Indian occultism. This occult side of the Tantras is of scientific importance, the more particularly having regard to the present revived interest in occult study in the west."

"My words of encouragement for women, for that to be given for women in the East, it is to have confidence and encourage them that they can accomplish Dharma just like the men; but in the West you have already realized the equality of women and men sometime ago, so I do not have to really encourage you – you already know that."

"However, the expresses feminine gender in only a qualified sense, since in her absolute essence she represents the ultimate beyond gender. From this point of view, she has no allegiance to anyone; it is inaccurate to say that women alone possess the dakini. When the practitioner truly understands this, liberation from gender concepts can be glimpsed. The wisdom dakini can best be understood in terms of her enlightened essence, the four dimensions that depict how the limitless nature of mind can manifest in human forms dedicated to the welfare and awakening of all beings."

"[T]he Tantras...are the embodiment of ceremonial black magic of the darkest dye...[T]hose Kabbalists who dabble in the ceremonial magic described...by Eliphas Levi are as full blown Tantrikas as those of Bengal"

"The path and the way, the processes by which we get illumined, lie in Tantra."

"The Tantric heritage and its pluralistic culture presents a great synthesis of Hinduism in its perfection. One strand of the Tantras is traced back to the Vedas. Another Strand of Tantra emanates from a non-vedic scriptural corpus, the Agamas. Apart from these two traditions, the Tantras incorporated several beliefs and practices of the indigenous oral-based cultures. Thus, in the course of its development Tantra absorbed knowledge of different Shastras within its fold, such as astrology, ayurveda, vastuvidya, yoga, ethnobotany and the occult sciences. The Tantric form of practice influenced all sects and sub-sects of Indian origin. So we have Buddhist, Jain and even Muslim forms of Tantra. The influence to Tantra is not limited to India alone; there is ample evidence that Tantrism in some from or other travelled to various parts of the world, especially Nepal, Tibet, China, [[w:Japan|Japan and parts of South-East Asia."

"The general scholarly consensus has been that the Yoginī cults so foundational to early Tantra emerged out of an autochthonous non-Vedic Indian source. (…) The point I wish to make here is that it is quite artificial to inject a distinction between ‘Vedic’ or ‘Indo-Aryan’ tradition, on the one hand, and ‘non-Vedic’ or ‘Indus Valley’ on the other. The religion and culture is already present in the Vedas, together with the more predominant Indo-Aryan material, and is no more ‘indigenous’ to the Indian subcontinent and no more ‘alien’ to the Veda than the latter. (…) It suffices to scratch the surface of the salient features of the Yoginī cults to find a vast reservoir of Vedic and classical Hindu precursors, in (1) the cults of Vedic goddesses (…); (2) the various groupings of unnumbered mother goddesses (…); and (3) in general attitudes toward women and femininity."

"...in , Samkhya provides the cosmological structure, Vedanta, the uncompromising and unalloyed Truth of indivisible Existence, Knowledge and Bliss, and Tantra and Yoga offer and define the method and the practice."

"The real meaning of the word Tantra is Shastra, as for example, Kâpila Tantra. But the word Tantra is generally used in a limited sense. Under the sway of kings who took up Buddhism and preached broadcast the doctrine of Ahimsâ, the performances of the Vedic Yâga-Yajnas became a thing of the past, and no one could kill any animal in sacrifice for fear of the king. But subsequently amongst the Buddhists themselves — who were converts from Hinduism — the best parts of these Yaga-Yajnas were taken up, and practiced in secret. From these sprang up the Tantras. Barring some of the abominable things in the Tantras, such as the Vâmâchâra etc., the Tantras are not so bad as people are inclined to think. There are many high and sublime Vedantic thoughts in them. In fact, the Brâhmana portions of the Vedas were modified a little and incorporated into the body of the Tantras. All the forms of our worship and the ceremonials of the present day, comprising the Karma Kanda, are observed in accordance with the Tantras."

"It was therefore that Shri Ramakrishna came. The days of practising the Tantra in that fashion are gone. He, too, practised the Tantra, but not in that way. Where there is the injunction of drinking wine, he would simply touch his forehead with a drop of it. The Tantrika form of worship is a very slippery ground. Hence I say that this province has had enough of the Tantra. Now it must go beyond. The Vedas should be studied. A harmony of the four kinds of Yogas must be practised and absolute chastity must be preserved"

"Tantra often runs into trouble in the West, because it utilizes transgression as the vehicle to transcend dualism in certain cases. To even begin to understand tantra, however, we must bear in mind the cultural and philosophical context in which it exists. Tantra originated as a range of bodily technologies for perfecting the individual. Many of its practices, texts, beliefs and traditions are opposed to any normative order and serve as a form of counterculture in India. Its rejection of order takes the form even of sanctioning the deliberate violation of norms, particularly those centred on ritual purity. Over time, there occurred a healthy cross-fertilizing back and forth with Vedic and other traditions. Elements may have been borrowed from Vedic and other rituals, symbols and philosophies, and reformulated, systematized and integrated into the coherent corpus of what became known as the tantra tradition. These two poles of values and rituals coexist and mutually penetrate each other in complex ways."

"In the Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Truth), Samkhya provides the cosmological structure, Vedanta, the uncompromising and unalloyed Truth of indivisible Existence, Knowledge and Bliss, and Tantra and Yoga offer and define the method and the practice. All of the above, together, represent the consummate path and way."

"Yoga, Vedanta and Tantra owe much of their basis and growth to the Samkhya philosophy which enumerates the twenty-four cosmic principles as a basis for the universal manifestation. This steady foundation assisted in the presentation of the life-giving, life-saving, life-transforming declarations of the Vedas. Due to this structure, Tantra gave birth to the many wonderful methods through which to realize the Truth contained in the Vedas and over time graced the system with twelve more powerful principles (tattvas) of a higher and purer order."

"...if we study the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, we find that though He taught the truths contained in the Upanishads, He illustrated these principles to us by methods that are Tantric in origin and content. His worship of and devotion to Mother Kali, Sri Krishna, Mother Sita, Lord Chaitanya, Lord Shiva, and others, reveal His wonderful Tantric nature and point to the many ways of practicing the Vedic truths."

"The children of Sri Ramakrishna are Vaidikas in essence, Tantrikas by path and process."

"Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is—both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology—of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy."

"Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in out writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. ...Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological."

"To his [ Plato's ] great disappointment, he found Anaxagoras adducing simple physical reasons, instead of the teleological reasons, which he had expected. Such a teacher could no longer allure him."

"Instead of accepting the Victorian myth of a struggle for existence in a blind and meaningless universe, one must, with Professor Lawrence Henderson, replace this with a picture of a partnership in mutual aid, in which the physical structure of matter itself, and the very distribution of the elements on the earth's crust, their quantity, their solubility, their specific gravity, their distribution and chemical combination, are life furthering and life-sustaining. Even the most rigorous scientific description of the physical basis of life indicates it to be internally teleological."

"If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity."

"General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties."

"I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil."

"The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History."

"In his famous book, What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger asks, "What is the source of the order in biology?" He arrives at the idea that it depends upon quantum mechanics and a microcode carried in some sort of aperiodic crystal—which turned out to be DNA and RNA—so he is brilliantly right. But if you ask if he got to the essence of what makes something alive, it's clear that he didn't. Although today we know bits and pieces about the machinery of cells, we don't know what makes them living things. However, it is possible that I've stumbled upon a definition of what it means for something to be alive. For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?"

"As soon as I begin to want to make my thinking teleological in relation to something else, interest enters the game. As soon as it is there, the ethical is present..."

"The privilege of aiming at a merely mechanical method of explanation of all natural products is in itself quite unlimited; but the faculty of attaining thereto is by the constitution of our Understanding, so far as it has to do with things as natural purposes, not only very much limited but also clearly bounded. For, according to a principle of the Judgement, by this process alone nothing can be accomplished towards an explanation of these things; and consequently the judgement upon such products must always be at the same time subordinated by us to a teleological principle."

"[An] example of the hubris of contemporary science is the rigorous banishment of the word "purpose" from its vocabulary. This is probably an aftermath of the reaction against the animism of Aristotelian physics, where stones accelerated their fall because of their impatience to get home, and against a teleological world-view in which the purpose of the stars was to serve as chronometers for man's profit. From Galileo onward, "final causes" were relegated into the realm of superstition, mechanical causality reigned supreme. ...The mechanistic universe gradually disintegrated, but the mechanistic notion of causality survived until Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle proved its untenability."

"Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology, and first establishes a Theology; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology, which is incapable of any definite concept."

"Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future—which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvature and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out—which, as Whittaker remarked, "is a statement so completely teleological that it certainly would have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen.""

"Our culture is teleological—it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"Teleology,... as science, belongs to no Doctrine, but only to Criticism; and to the criticism of a special cognitive faculty, viz. Judgement. But so far as it contains principles a priori, it can and must furnish the method by which nature must be judged according to the principle of final causes."

"It is best... to exclude religious associations (as being un-Aristotelian) from our conception of the ethical τέλος, and then we may be free to acknowledge that it is evidently meant to have a definite relation to the nature and constitution of man. Thus Aristotle assumes that the desires of man are so framed as to imply the existence of this τέλος (Eth. I. ii. i.)"

"In the old philosophy, a curious conjunction of ethical and physical prejudices had led to the notion that there was something ethically bad and physically obstructive about matter. Aristotle attributes all irregularities and apparent dysteleologies in nature to the disobedience, or sluggish yielding, of matter to the shaping and guiding influence of those reasons and causes which were hypostatised in his ideal 'Forms.'"

"The End mixes itself up with the efficient cause, the desire for the end gives the first impulse of motion, the final cause of anything becomes identical with the good of that thing, so that the end and the good become synonymous terms. And this is not only the case with regard to individual objects, but all nature and the whole world exist for the sake of, and in dependence on, their final cause, which is the Good. This, existing as an object of contemplation and desire, though itself immovable, moves all things. And so the world is rendered finite, for all nature desiring the Good and tending towards an end is harmonised and united."

"In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Treviranus, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the greatest naturalist of the age [Cuvier] with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution."

"The concept of teleological mechanisms, however it be expressed in many terms, may be viewed as an attempt to escape from these older mechanistic formulations that now appear inadequate, and to provide new and more fruitful conceptions and more effective methodologies for studying self-regulating processes, self-orienting systems and organisms, and self-directing personalities. Thus, the terms feedback, servomechanisms, circular systems, and circular processes may be viewed as different but equivalent expressions of much the same basic conception"

"The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. ...The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another."

"The Pythagoreans had found in the astral order the proportions of the concordant musical scale... a harmonia... Thereby they created the most enchanting symbol of Greek cosmic piety: "harmony," issuing in the inaudible "music of the spheres," [as] the idealizing expression for the same fact of irrefragable order that astrology stresses less optimistically... Stoic philsophy strove to integrate the idea of destiny as propounded by contemporary astrology with the Greek concept of harmony: to the Stoics is the practical aspect of the harmony, i.e., its action as it affects terrestrial conditions and the short-lived beings here. And since the stellar movements are actuated by the cosmic and this logos functions in the world-process as providence (pronoia), it follows that in this wholly monistic system heimarmene itself is pronoia, that is, fate and divine providence are the same. The understanding of and willing consent to this fate... as the reason of the whole distinguishes the wise man, who bears adversity... as the price... for the harmony of the whole. The existence of the whole... is the ultimate and no further questionable, self-justifying end in this teleological scheme: for the sake of the cosmos its constituent parts exist... for the sake of the whole organism. Man... is by no means the highest mode of being, he is not the end of nature, and the cosmos is not for his sake."

"Knowledge of anything implies knowing it from these four points of view, or knowing its four causes. The End or final cause, however, as is natural, rises to an eminence beyond the other conceptions, and though it must always stand opposed to matter, it tends to merge the other two causes into itself. The end of anything, that for the sake of which anything exists, can hardly be separated from the perfection of that thing, from its idea and form; thus the formal cause or definition becomes absorbed into the final cause. (Eth. III. vii. 6)"

"Science does not accept Aristotelian styles of explanation, that a stone falls because of its nature... it likes to be on Earth... Within science, all causes must be local and instrumental. Purpose is not acceptable as an explanation... Action at a distance, either in space or time, is forbidden. Especially, teleological influences of final goals upon phenomena are forbidden. ...The choice of laws of nature, and the choice of initial conditions for the universe, are questions belonging to meta-science and not to science. Science is restricted to the explanation of phenomena within the universe. Teleology is not forbidden when explanations go beyond ...into meta-science. The most familiar example of a meta-scientific explanation is the so-called Anthropic Principle. ...It accords with the spirit of modern science that we have two complementary styles of explanation, the teleological style allowing a role for purpose in the universe at large, and the non-teleological style excluding purpose..."

"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. ...Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being."

"Teleology is not the antithesis of causality, but subordinate to it. It is, of course, inadmissible to consider "final causes" as implying that an object or end is capable of having effect. No event that has not yet taken place can possibly act. But results are caused by the keeping of the end in view, and it is in this way that the final becomes an efficient cause. These final efficient causes are not in the slightest degree metaphysical, for they derive from organic matter."