What has just been described—the luminosity of possibility—is a stage which should, in the end, be superior to what I call the “intermediate level of Tantra”, in the sense that once one has entered the yogic condition, one proceeds within it, as the texts say, and indeed many conditions “must” be realized; one is not instantaneously catapulted into living all this together, or rather yes, but one must become aware of where one finds oneself. For example, the ever-present cave, a topos in the texts of adepts as well as of the called or of certain literati, is a way which for adepts and some of the called signifies experiencing the cranial vault as empty—or rather the encephalon itself as empty—the supra-physical place in which the ātman manifests, as column or axis or as oscillation, and here one is consciousness-no-longer-I. What is one, then? How can one realize not-being-the-I if it is precisely the awakened and conscious consciousness—namely the I—that realizes it? So is there truly a state of consciousness anterior to the I? These, before being analyses a posteriori, are completeness and spontaneous realization diachronically subsequent to not-being-the-I, as the texts say, because if one did not live and realize being consciousness-that-is-not-the-I, one could not be astonished at not being the I (this might indeed be the “astonishment” that generates viveka, just as the thauma of seeing objects decompose generated in Aristotle rational philosophy).
The Tantra of Tibet say that realizing śūnyatā, emptiness, is indeed a moment distinct from that of the installation of the clear light; indeed, it is precisely the state to which the mechanism of Kuṇḍalī can give access, but these are aspects of one and the same process, in the sense that clear light and emptiness are reciprocally implicated—or rather the same thing—to which one gains access, in the final analysis, by grace, whether or not favored by the kuṇḍalinī-yoga. Śūnyatā is precisely rigpa, consciousness-not-I; it is not that there are rules or schemas or processes or concepts (in the Tibetan texts one does not speak of ātman—which is a Sanskrit term proper to Vedānta—but indeed to say emptiness is to say not-being-the-I, and the consciousness of this is what the Indian yoga call ātman; and on the other hand the notion of anātman, which means precisely non-ātman and is a typical expression of non-Tantric Buddhism, is not employed in Vajrayāna; and in any case it hardly seems necessary to specify that the opposition between anātman and ātman is purely philosophical: from the Tantric “point of view” the substance is abiding in the base of mind anterior to the I, and whether one calls this ātman or non-ātman is a purely nominalistic difference. Even in the East, needless to say, there are many philosophies which—though not as wavering and arbitrary as Western ones—are in essence "noise of words", just as the argumentation of the Greeks is said to be in the Corpus Hermeticum).
To emptiness, it is written in the Tantra, it is necessary to gain access at least once; otherwise, needless to say, one cannot even minimally understand what it signifies. Nāgārjuna—author of the Seventy Stanzas on Emptiness, the inaugurating text of the School of the Middle Way, the Mādhyamika, which resolved the disputes on the word “impermanence” spoken by the Buddha Śākyamuni—is also called Ṛṣi, and portrayed as nāga, that is, mystical cobra, from the waist down a serpent coiled in three and a half turns, in the manner in which the Indian Tantra describe Kuṇḍali resting in the Mūlādhāra-cakra. Emptiness for Buddhist philosophers is a concept; for the yogīn it is a neurobiological condition to which one must gain access. Thereafter, they write, life is changed forever, even if one does not know it. In both cases—whether for philosophers or for adepts—śūnyatā is the “conditioned co-production” spoken of by Nāgārjuna, only that for the former these are two abstract words, for the yogīn an image that refers to the authentic nature of reality as they in fact live it.
The yogīn, who as a rule live all of Tantra assisted by a guru, write that slowly—perhaps in spare moments, whether meditating or non-meditating—certain thoughts refer back to that vacuous state; and gradually many different states are then realized, that is, one realizes being the ātman, but one does not know what the ātman is, and at the same time one realizes still being an I; and all these are conditions that follow one another, sometimes at a distance of time, perhaps for long having superficially forgotten or altogether rejected emptiness and ātman, and yet they always pervade the mind, to then reappear as “physical thought”, and thus emptiness is re-lived unexpectedly—not as memory—but is re-lived while being clearly conscious and aware of being an I. One might say that one re-lives the past in the present—just as there are often effective anticipations of what will be realized, consciously lived as portions of the future fallen into the present, only to see later that the texts call them anticipations, though they are themselves the realizations.
Now, the texts are full of actualized descriptions of these two frameworks which, analytically, must be called “living the past in the present” and “living the future in the present”, at times presented theoretically in a logical manner, at times narrated in the unawareness of those who narrate them; and then there are, indeed, hosts of analogous conditions—that is, all the variations of śūnyatā, namely the possible interactions of ātman and I’s—among which the mentioned chidākāśa-dhāraṇā is a very explicit exemplar. In any case, all these concatenations among the revealed texts are not analogical concatenations, but are purely logical—expressions of pre-theoretical logic, however—which is founded upon “co-participation”. If one notes a gap between the concatenating in itself, called pre-logical, and the pre-logic of the concatenated events, well, this too is “the same”: the concatenation of pre-theoretical events, one means, is itself a pre-theoretical event. It is not a matter of placing upon the same abstract plane abstract logic and abstract ontology—as Western philosophers do, all of them without knowing it—but of exercising the yoga of practical discrimination, which is, if not exactly having lived every event read, at least seeing it as identical to the others on this side of the words, a varied expression of one and the same unique occurring.
Realizing such various conditions constitutes precisely the intermediate level of Tantra, which consists of these realizations that are simply the givenness of the single “event” that is the ātman or śūnyatā: there are no stages in themselves, only modalities of the manifesting of śūnyatā or ātman. All the yoga and the secret doctrines are purely the realizing of the ātman or śūnyatā, and this realizing refracts into a thousand reflections—variable not so much due to cultural or theological context as due to the refracting itself, which the words then describe.
Well then, the intermediate level of Tantra is realizing this refracting, whereas the condition called above “luminosity of possibility” is rather the culmination of the intermediate level of Tantra—indeed, it is already being within the stage subsequent to Tantra, which Alchemy calls the opus rubeum, and which the Tibetans, according to the Schools, call Mahāmudrā or Dzogchen. To the anuttarayoga-tantra (gtum-mo, yoga of the illusory body, yoga of the clear light, of dream, of sleep—namely, as outcomes: Kuṇḍalī, light, ātman) there follows atiyoga, the primordial yoga, where, according to the adage of the Three Testaments of Garab Dorje—the non-human being who bestowed Dzogchen upon human beings—one is introduced to the natural state, one realizes it, one integrates it; and indeed, being introduced to the natural state of Dzogchen is realizing the ātman, that is, it is the same intermediate level of Tantra but shifted into a different point of view—whoever, in these ambits, seeks grades, hierarchies and classifications has evidently not understood what it means that the Base is the Path and is the Fruit. Progression, certainly, exists—and exists both among vehicles and within each vehicle, as all the texts say—but it depends purely on the different modes of the givenness of the ātman, which means on the neurobiological condition that is different in each individual.
This—which is purely insane for Westerners—being the matrix of Tantra, makes evident that the naturalness and spontaneity of which the Tantra speak are not something that the Western man can paternalistically imagine: this naturalness and spontaneity, being the ātman itself, express a state that is not at all psychological, nor perceptive, nor emotional, nor behavioral, nor subconscious, but is the natural state of mind which the called one had always glimpsed and never understood. Only, one can become effectively aware of it, the Tantra say, only if one experiences it neurobiologically (through the activation of Kuṇḍalī), and thus the “progressive” realizing is the “intermediate state of Tantra”—which in turn, it is repeated, is literally non-communicable because anterior to representational thought and to ordinary language. It is not that the yogīn live in nonexistent or parallel worlds or in hermeneutic circles; they declare that they live the very same phenomenal reality that exists for all, only that they live it as it truly is and not as it is represented by a mind limited to sensory perceptions. They perceive structures, not merely concepts and facts; they apprehend the “souls”, the ātman, and not the thoughts that deform them (and from here arises bodhicitta, key word of Buddhism—that is, compassion—because of the ignorance of their true nature on the part of the generality of human beings).
The ātman is a form of natural consciousness unbound from transitory thoughts; it “physically” directs from above, in harmony, one might say, with what Plato calls to agathon, which ought rightly to be rendered, with Heidegger, as “the adequate”, rather than as the Good or the good—terms which create metaphysical idols in place of simple reality. The problem of the ordinary mind is that it believes its own thoughts; the point is not to note that some thoughts are right and others wrong, as is evident to anyone; the point is that the ordinary mind judges on the basis of its own thoughts, on the basis of those it deems worthy to be taken as guide, or of those that impose themselves. In every case, the ordinary mind judges on the basis of “thoughts” that appear there by chance, without realizing what thoughts are, without realizing whence they come, without realizing, that is, that they are only thoughts. There are, that is, two levels of error, it is repeated: judging is certainly an error, but it is subsequent to the self-illusion of “believing in thoughts”. One judges—that is, one holds something to be true or false—only if one believes there to be entities, things or persons self-subsistent, which, because of their supposed self-subsistence with respect to an I that believes itself self-subsistent, appear “to be understood”, and thus to be judged. (On the one hand, one may observe how what is said is the same as what Heidegger says concerning technique: it is not the manipulation of things that is erroneous in itself—it may lead to medicines as well as to the guillotine—but the believing that one must manipulate. On the other hand, the “do not judge”—a motto as well-known as it is misunderstood—does not mean a pathetic “do not disparage”, nor does it mean abstaining from righting the distortions caused by a “worse judging” on the part of others; justice, as long as there are I’s who believe they know, is obviously necessary, being the balancing of egoic attachments.)
The ordinary mind is that entity which undergoes its own thoughts—here is the ultimate declension of subjectum: for Aristotle and up to the Scholastics the subject is the upokeimenon, the substratum, that is, the essence that lies beneath; with Descartes the subjectum becomes essence itself, the "point of view"; in reality, in the reality of the actual mind, the subjectum is that which is subjected to thoughts, that which writhes in their grip—both the great philosophers and one who must procure a meal flounder in the same puddle. The ordinary mind cannot even conceive that the ātman exists, because the ātman gives itself when thoughts cease, and therefore evidently cannot be thought; thus, when it reads of it, it automatically reduces it to its own thoughts, which are precisely what occludes the ātman. And yet lama, yogīn, and adepts periodically repeat that the jewel that grants wishes is (within) the mind, that (within) the mind is the kingdom of god or nirvāṇa; this they say is the ātman—not delusions of omnipotence nor messianic delusions—and they repeat it “for the benefit of sentient beings”, for those who may draw advantage from it.
Thus, to say that the ātman directs from above is already a metaphor; one may equally say that it is the path, that it is the Sanātana dharma irradiating itself in the yogī, or that it is Kuṇḍali, the goddess of language—that is, of creating with the mind. But all these and similar expressions are mentions of the givenness, in individuum, of the Brahman; and this is precisely the natural spontaneity in which the acting I’s participate: they are so insofar as they are clouded, precisely because the I’s are what clouds. When Heidegger says that his pre-metaphysical Being gives itself by concealing itself, he evidently glimpses the same as Abhinavagupta, who affirms that Śiva gives himself by concealing himself: both refer—Heidegger more in his own manner than the latter—to that dimension which is authentic reality, which the Upaniṣad call Brahman.
To be outside Kárman is an alternative expression to being outside the three times, as another option is saying being outside saṃsāra. Kárman is not merely a law of cause and effect—however different from the causality accepted by the rationalistic mentality; rather, Kárman is the Brahman spoken under the form of causality. To exit Kárman does not mean to be exempt from causality; it means to concur in creating it through spontaneity (and indeed the term Kárman in the ancient texts, in the Ṛgveda, means something like “action”; only later did the notion of the wheel of Kárman as an etiological concatenation establish itself). The Path of Kárman-yoga means, at the ordinary level, right action, and at the higher level precisely the creating of reality: these are co-existent visions; the categories exist only insofar as one seeks them. Saṃsāra, then, is the conventional reality, which the Buddha recognized as suffering: this is the first of the Four Noble Truths, the subsequent ones being the identification of the cause of suffering in ignorance (of one’s true nature, needless to say), then the recognition of the possibility of overcoming suffering (which leads to nirvāṇa), and finally the path to pursue the objective—that is, the eightfold path—of which the Path of Tantra is a part.
Continue in Part VI