A World of Delight

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, 
everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
~ William Blake

 

I have borrowed the words of the title to another of William Blake’s poems. It points to the realisation that our true nature is intimately married to the world, and that the expression of this understanding is pure, unconditional delight or happiness. This is the Tantric view: in Rupert Spira’s words, “the intimate knowing that Consciousness, what we truly are, is the substance of Reality, that there is only one thing, that there is only Being.” I have gathered here many quotes and pointers on this subject, from various spiritual teachers. They will tell you the story of the world…

 

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“Tantrism aims to allow man to achieve liberation without renouncing the world, to achieve the paradoxical coincidence of manifestation and divinity.”
~ André Padoux

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“Take the mind away from the world. What remains? You can neither say that it exists or that it does not exist. So you alone remain. Therefore, the world is only a thought.” 
~ Atmananda Krishna Menon

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“An object exists because we think about it; we don’t think about it because it exists.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“In tantra, sadhakas look upon this world as the manifestation of Shakti, the Divine Mother. It is real — not absolutely real, of course. But consider this comparison: Vedanta says, ‘Get away from maya, get out!’ Tantra says: ‘No, no, worship maya. Don’t get out; don’t throw it away; don’t discard it.’ This is the beauty of tantra. It doesn’t deny the world; it says, ‘The world is beautiful; it is true; it is the playground of the Divine Mother, and we are all her playmates.’ According to tantra, we have to realise Brahman through this world, not by negating this world. People are often confused by and fearful of the world, but God did not create the world to frighten people. There must be a purpose of this creation. What is the purpose? Play.” 
~ Swami Chetanananda

 

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“We do not perceive a world outside Consciousness. 
The world is our perception of the world. 
There is no evidence that there is a world outside the perception of it, 
outside Consciousness.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject the same plus a contracted locus of self-awareness. This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. The unbounded Light of Consciousness contracts into finite embodied loci of awareness out of its own free will. When those finite subjects then identify with the limited and circumscribed cognitions and circumstances that make up this phase of their existence, instead of identifying with the transindividual overarching pulsation of pure Awareness that is their true nature, they experience what they call ‘suffering’.”
~ Christopher Wallis

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“Some see beauty in the mountain. A mountain is a concrete object of perception and beauty is the experience. You cannot separate the two. So you make the mountain the possessor of beauty and call it beautiful. But the Truth is just the opposite. Beauty possesses the mountain – because beauty exists beyond the body, senses and mind and so can exist even without the mountain or any other object. That which transcends body, senses and mind is only the ‘I’- principle or Truth. So beauty is yourself.”
~ Atmananda Krishna Menon

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“The seen cannot be separated from seeing and seeing cannot be separated from Consciousness. A solid object cannot appear in Consciousness any more than a solid object can appear in thought. Only an object that is made out of matter could appear in space. Only an object that is made out of mind could appear in mind. And only an object that is made out of Consciousness can appear in Consciousness.” 
~ Rupert Spira

 

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“Every bird that cuts the airy way 
is an immense world of delight 
enclosed by the five senses.”
~ William Blake 

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“What comes directly from purity is beauty. When somebody recites a mantra it is beauty, joy, and it is the same with yoga, dance, making a temple, reciting poetry. Traditional art is done for the sake of beauty, not as a means of reinforcing the fantasy of being enlightened. Projections of being enlightened or being superman are the same fantasy. So, there are no more problems with women, no more problems with money, no more problems with the body, no one is disturbed by the neighbour. We stop pretending to be anything other than what we are and in this silence, all the beauty of the traditional forms can really be appreciated for what it is and not as a way to becoming free. It is seeing beauty itself, in action. That is why in the tantric tradition of Kashmirian non-dualism, the arts have been heavily emphasized, as opposed to yoga and the classical Vedanta tradition, where art is seen as a distraction for the senses.”
~ Eric Baret

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“The signature of consciousness is the experience ‘I am’. So every experience contains within it what I am. And that signature is transparent, it has no colour of its own, but it is contained within, it is the colourless paint before it is tainted with each particular colour. So it’s fine to focus on a particular brushstroke, on a particular perception, as long as you’re not focusing on its objective aspect, but you’re using the object to take you to the signature of consciousness, to the experience ‘I am’. So you can follow every experience – this is the Tantric path, we don’t start by going inwards towards the ‘I am’, you follow your perception. But you don’t stop with the objective aspect of the perception, you go through it to the colourless paint out of which it is made, the signature of consciousness which is always the experience ‘I am’. … Follow every experience, give your attention to objective experience and follow it all the way until you arrive at the signature of consciousness.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“The ‘this’ is something appearing distinct and separate from the ‘I’. While the ‘I’ can exist independently in its own right, the ‘this’ cannot have a separate existence even for a moment. Therefore, in order to know the content of ‘this’, you have only to separate the ‘this’-ness from the ‘this’. It can be done with effort and sometimes without effort. Then the pure ‘I’ remains over, proving thereby that the ‘this’ is in essence nothing other than the ‘I’. Therefore the world is nothing but the real ‘I’.”
~ Atmananda Krishna

 

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“In the Tantric tradition, the pleasure of the senses are 
a gateway into infinite consciousness.”
~ Rupert Spira 

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“Sadhana is seen in the Kashmir Tradition as an expression of this insight, not as a way to come back to it. … Sadhana is the art of expressing silence in everyday activities, that is to say expressing this evidence on the level of body and mind. That is why all the arts in the East are seen as sadhana: dancing, poetry, the art of war, the art of love. In India, music is sadhana for a musician; for a servant activity is sadhana; for a widow life without her husband is sadhana. All expressions of life can be seen as sadhana, can be seen to express this conviction that life is not about doing, acquiring or getting something.”
~ Eric Baret

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“As soon as we wake up from deep sleep, the existence of a ready-made world – including our own bodies – confronts us. To examine it closely, we utilize our sense organs straightaway – one by one, relying on their superficial evidence without a thought. The organ of sight asserts that the world is only form and nothing else; the organ of hearing that the world is only sound and nothing else; and so on. Each organ thus asserts the world as its sole and particular object. In effect, each sense organ contradicts the evidence of the other four organs, with equal force. This hopeless mess of contradictory evidence, and the stubborn denial by each of the sense organs of the others’ evidence, form positive proof of the falsity of this world – as it appears. But all the while, the existence of a positive something is experienced without a break, beyond the shadow of a doubt. This, on closer analysis, is found to be that changeless, subjective ‘I’-principle or Consciousness itself.”
~ Atmananda Krishna Menon

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“The recognition of our true nature is a stage in but not the end of the spiritual path. The aim of this approach is to establish the non-dual understanding in all realms of experience. It involves a process of realigning the way we feel the body and perceive the world with the recognition of our true nature of eternal, infinite Awareness.”
~ Rupert Spira

 

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“Beauty is not the attribute of an object. 
It is inherent in the fundamental nature of experience. 
It is the experience of recognising that 
Consciousness and Reality are one.”
~ Rupert Spira 

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“The ‘I’-ness is the ego, which develops into body, senses and mind. The ‘this’-ness is the non-ego, which develops into the world. But the ‘this’-ness can never stand by itself. Therefore, neither reason nor experience allows us to state that objects appear in the ‘this’-ness alone. Both of them appear and disappear on Atma [Self], the only Reality.”
~ Atmananda Krishna Menon

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“The Tantric path involves a turning towards experience. It is an exploration of objective experience in the light of our enlightened understanding, rather than a turning away from experience in favour of its background of pure awareness, as is the case in the Vedantic approach. If the Vedantic path is the path from ‘I am something’ – a body and mind – to ‘I am nothing’, the Tantric path could be said to be the path from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’. If the Vedantic path is one of exclusion or discrimination, the Tantric path is one of inclusion or love. In the Zen tradition the Vedantic path is known as the Great Death, the Tantric path as the Great Rebirth.”
~ Rupert Spira

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“Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim.
My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of thy temple.
No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.
Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore

 

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“Can the mind observe without the word, without the image, without the conditioning?”
~ Krishnamurti 

 

 

– Pictures by Alain Joly

– Read on the blog, Tantra, the Song of Life

Bibliography:
– ‘Tantra, The Path of Ecstasy’ – by Georg Feuerstein – (Shambhala)
– ‘Let the Moon be Free’ – by Eric Baret – (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)
– ‘The First and Last Freedom’ – by J. Krishnamurti – (Rider Book)
– ‘Presence‘, Vol. I & II – by Rupert Spira (Non-Duality Press)
– ‘Gitanjali or Song Offerings’ – by Rabindranath Tagore – (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)

Websites
– Rudolph Tegner (Wikipedia)
– J. Krishnamurti
– Rupert Spira
– Atmananda Krishna Menon (Wikipedia)
– William Blake (Wikipedia)
– Christopher Wallis
– Swami Chetananda
– Rabindranath Tagore (Wikipedia)

 

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