Good Fortune.

[Guest guest]

A profound excerpt from Daniel Odier's Tantric Quest.

 

Q. Why do we lose our capacity for wonder?

 

A. Education, society, sick love, hate, desire, jealousy, ambition, mental and

material quests – all these things make us strangers to ourselves. We think only

of copying, imitating, achieving new states, and whether or not our desires are

fulfilled, we lose the happiness within us. Then we come to imagine heaven and

hell separate from ourselves. This is a great subterfuge, which allows our

consciousness to function outside of ecstasy. If man knew that he himself was

God and heaven and hell, no illusions would have a hold on him; nothing could

limit his consciousness.

 

Placing heaven outside self allows suffering to become an institution maintained

by society's dream at such a high level that we can no longer escape from it.

Whatever our fortune starting out in life, a day comes when we decide to limit

our consciousness, to dry it up.

 

As for the mythical crisis of adolescence, the great revolts that make us doubt

the path indicated by others, one day we step back and decide to pay our

imaginary debts to society. We accept the death of our true selves. And the

great fraud is that this death troubles no one. To the contrary, it is watched

for, welcomed, and rewarded. As soon as the price of this spiritual death is

accepted, it becomes extremely hard to follow another route. That can happen

only at the cost of immense effort and very great courage. Those who have

accepted their own deaths have only one possibility: to become followers of a

religion or group that places the divine outside the self. Thus, everything is

subsumed by society's order and interest, aligned to those of the churches and

sects, which operate from the same common base: the death of divine

consciousness. The driving forces are guilt, fear, obedience. The results are

rigidity, distance from sensory objects, obsession, Puritanism, violence, moral

codes, exclusion. In India, America, China, the Mideast, Europe – that is the

mode of operation we see at work throughout.

 

Q. Are there many successive awakenings before the Great Awakening?

 

A. If you think that a Great Awakening exists, you're caught in a formidable

trap, which will make you confuse an awakening with that final state. You'll

remain blocked by mistaking it for what it's not. The basis of Tantric Sadhana

is always to wait for a new veil to be torn away without your spiritual

qualities hardening. In nature, nothing ceases to evolve, to be infinitely

transformed. To look for a stable state is to cut yourself off from reality.

Everything is based on respiration. Can you breathe in for three hours? No. You

breathe in and breathe out. We follow the movement of the universe, going in and

out, opening and closing, expanding and contracting. All activity takes place in

these two modes, and it is their perfect comprehension, their perfect

integration into our practice, that allows consciousness to breathe. Never

forget that consciousness breathes.

 

Q. You spoke of our fortunes starting out in life. What was it you wanted to

say?

 

A. To be conceived through love is good fortune. To be born to a loving woman is

good fortune. To be born to a yogini is good fortune. To live in a harmonious

family, to meet a friend, then a spiritual master is good fortune. To have

self-confidence is good fortune. To have the strength to revolt is good fortune.

To cling to nothing, no philosophy, no belief, no dogma is good fortune. To

remember an instance of awakening and return to this source is good fortune. To

know any single one of these things is good fortune.

 

- Daniel Odier, from Tantric Quest.