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In contrast with our own Christian upbringing which taught us a very small world, Tantra knows an infinite number of universes, themselves already as large as the modern physicists’ universe. All these together are the Mother, all universes are part of it, but the Mother is not just the physical dimension, She encompasses deeper, more subtle levels of reality as well. Navarātrī is the time to contemplate this.

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"1. Mother Universe
The world generating spirit of the father passes into the manifold of earthly experience through a transforming medium - the mother of the world. She is a personification of the primal elements named in the second verse of Genesis - "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure whom the self begot all creatures through: more abstractly understood, she is the world-bounding frame: time, space, and causality. the shell of the cosmic egg. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the self-brooding absolute to the act of creation.
In mythologies emphasizing the maternal rather than the paternal aspect of creation, this original female fills the wolrd stages in the beginning, playing the roles that are elsewhere assigned to males. And she is a virgin, because her spouse is the Invisible Unknown."

Tantra is the [[w:Asia}Asian]] body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the universe we experience is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm in creative and emancipatory ways.

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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.

interrupt you." Dom said, "I was about to tell our guests the story of Eternity. — To understand it, you must first understand that there are many different Universes that can exist — virtually an infinite number. Every single event that takes place can take place or not take place, or can take place in this fashion or in that fashion, and each of an enormous number of alternatives will result in a future course of events that are distinct to at least some degree.

The energy levels of the Tantric universe are generally represented as a set of concentric circles (cakras) of hypostasized forms of the divine energy which, in addition to appearing as an array of divine enlightened, perfected , demonic, human or animal beings, also manifest themselves on an acoustic level, as garlands or piled-up aggregates of phonemes (mantras), on a graphic level, as the written characters of the hieratic alphabets and as the hierarchized cakras of the yogi body.

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Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign — not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind.

Now to your questions. Of course, the "Mother of the World" is at the head of the Great Hierarchy of Light of our planet. Read in the Cryptograms of the East the narrative about the Mother of the World, and accept it as the highest reality. Behind each symbol stands a High Individuality, and each symbol covers a great reality. Each Great Individuality has its deputies, or personifiers, who are nearest to its Ray, and sometimes one of these Great Individualities personally incarnates—hence, the concept of the Avatar. (18 June 1935)

To practice tantra requires even greater compassion and greater intelligence than are required on the sutra path; thus, though many persons in the degenerate era are interested in tantra, tantra is not for degenerate persons. Tantra is limited to persons whose compassion is so great that they cannot bear to spend unnecessary time in attaining Buddhahood, as they want to be a supreme source of help and happiness for others quickly.

The universe is in fact the constantly reborn “child” of the lovemaking of the “Father” and “Mother,” Shiva and Shakti, who at all moments dance in and out of, and merge with, each other’s being with divine complexity, subtlety, passion, and ecstatic humor.

There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth. For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming worlds which are as magnificent as our own, perhaps more so, and which enjoy the fructifying rays of a sun just as we do, should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect inhabitants than our earth. The unnumbered worlds in the universe are all similar in form and rank and subject to the same forces and the same laws. Impart to us the knowledge of the universality of terrestrial laws throughout all worlds and of the similarity of all substances in the cosmos! Destroy the theories that the earth is the center of the universe! Crush the supernatural powers said to animate the world, along with the so-called crystalline spheres! Open the door through which we can look out into the limitless, unified firmament composed of similar elements and show us that the other worlds float in an ethereal ocean like our own! Make it plain to us that the motions of all the worlds proceed from inner forces and teach us in the light of such attitudes to go forward with surer tread in the investigation and discovery of nature! Take comfort, the time will come when all men will see as I do.

Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence and keeping it in being. Such Beings are as real and more permanently real than the men they influence but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic consciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human consciousness on which they exercise their influence. It is natural for man who sees only his own consciousness individual, national or racial at work and does not see what works upon it and shapes it, to think that all is created by him and there is nothing cosmic and greater behind it.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.

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