"For tantrikas [practitioners of tantra], desire is the mark of the endless creativity of consciousness. It is the very movement, the very nature, of the universe itself. In discovering the universality of desire, we enter its radiant space . . . When we ask ourselves the question: 'What do we really desire?' we generally believe that we desire to possess people or objects. Hence, we go through the world as predators, seeking to appropriate for ourselves everything our desire can touch. But after a short time, we realize that we are dissatisfied, and this mechanism of truncated desire pushes us unceasingly to desire more objects, in an endless cycle that eventually gives way to frustration.
" 'What if desire were to desire something other than objects?' the Tantric masters then wondered. If desire were simply the incandescence that gives us the feeling of being alive, were intensity, were the tremoring vibration that carries us, then it would be absurd to allow it to be consumed by objects and to lose it once we possess the object or realize we cannot attain it. This profound movement of desire is life itself, and this tremoring is the one that all yoginis and yogis experience, precisely because they remain in the incandescence of desire without rendering it dependent upon the object . . . Here, we allow our desire to blossom out over all objects. When our desire occupies all of space, the absence of one object goes totally unnoticed, because the flow of our awareness remains free to come into contact with thousands of others. In the tantric sadhana there is a particular practice wherein the yogi sees the world as desire. Everything - a leaf falling from a tree, the sky, the snow, the water he drinks, his food - desires him. Each contact with reality becomes a celebration of the universality of desire. Fixation on a single object thus ceases to exist."
Daniel Odier
Photo: Midway Geyser Basin at dusk, Yellowstone National Park, WY, September 3, 2011
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