Chapter 7: Truth Is Neither Holy nor Unholy
A tantrika says: This is the way to know truth - while you are eating, then let there be only eating and nothing else, then let the past disappear and the future too; then let your whole energy be poured on your food. Let there be love and affection and gratitude towards food. Chew each bite with tremendous energy and you will have not only the taste of the food but the taste of existence, because the food is part of existence. It brings life; it brings vitality, it brings prana. It makes you tick on, it helps you to remain alive, it is not just food.
Food may be the container: life is contained in it. If you taste only food and you don’t taste existence in it, you are living a lukewarm life; then you don’t know how a tantrika lives. When you are drinking water, become thirst! Let there be an intensity to it, so each drop of cool water gives you tremendous joy. In that very experience of those drops of water entering your throat and giving you great contentment, you will taste God, you will taste reality.
Tantra is not ordinary indulgence: it is extraordinary indulgence. It is not ordinary indulgence because it indulges in God itself. But, Tantra says, it is through the small things of life that you have the taste. There are no big things in life, everything is small. The small thing becomes big and great if you enter into it utterly, totally, wholly.
Making love to a woman or a man, be the love. Forget everything! In that moment let there be nothing else. Let the whole existence converge on your lovemaking. Let that love be wild, innocent, innocent in the sense that there is no mind to corrupt it. Don’t think about it, don’t imagine about it, because all that imagination and thinking keeps you thin, spread thin. Let all thinking disappear. Let the act be total. You be in the act.lost, absorbed, gone.and then, through love, you will know what God is.
Tantra says: It can be known through drinking, it can be known through eating, it can be known through love. It can be known from every space, from every corner, from every angle, because all angles are his. It is all truth.
And don’t think that you are unfortunate because you were not in the beginning when God created the world. He is creating right now! You are fortunate to be here, you can see him creating this moment. And don’t think you will miss when the world disappears with a bang; it is disappearing right now. Each moment it is created, each moment it disappears. Each moment it is born, each moment it dies.
So, Tantra says, let that be your life also, each moment dying to the past; each moment being born anew. Don’t carry the load. Remain empty. And.
Yet end and beginning are nowhere else.
They are herenow.
All those with minds deluded by interpretative thoughts
Are in two minds
And so discuss nothingness and compassion as two things.
Now there are two ways to describe this experience of truth, this existential experience of that which is, the experience of suchness. There are two ways to describe it because we have two types of words, the positive and the negative. Saraha’s emphasis is on the negative, because that was the emphasis of Buddha.