A Brief Manifesto on Variety (For Dreamers, Poets and Tantric Artists)
Variety doesn’t exist just to appease Ennui; we each possess a psychic need to externalise inner forces, to find fresh images for buried depths.
Religions, like artistic movements, only die when their metaphors begin to feel tired. Conservatives are a dying breed. The world is always slipping through their fingers. The Dreamer looks ahead; he or she may suffer, but is never sacrificed, in the same way conservatives are sacrificed.
The aim of Tantra is to fuse one’s self-image with the image of an ideal being, say, a deity, in the Buddhist tradition. The process consists of a blending of creative faculties, philosophical intent and more secular notions of subjectivism and projections. It is a place where idealism celebrates its own fragile foundations without attempting to cast them in more rigid forms. It is a place where the gods dance in the pure lands of the imagination. It is a place that channels the unconscious, the primordial Oneness, where our stillest minds have their most peaceful roots. It is a place of inspiration for the spiritual alchemist, who looks at the world and its infinite inflections of Mercurius, the world-creating spirit, and seeks to build his or her own personal shrine to vitality through image generation and meditation.
As our imaginations and constitutions are diverse, so the gods are many. The word Tantra means ‘deity practice’ and originally involved a ritualised meditation whose aim was to unlock the creative powers of the dreamer and initiate union with a higher plane of being. It was a Transformational Art defined by numerous deities. The dreamer did not need to understand the symbolism of all the deities. One deity was sufficient to understand the nature of them all. The deities were never considered external gods but manifestations of inner psychic forces. You picked the one that called you most distinctly.
The same is true with poetry and great works of art. We each have our own crooked nook of reality and imaginative resources to embolden our quests. Beauty, although never entirely relative, consists of diverse manifestations, many of them contradictory. There are many paths but there is only One Reality.
In whose projection will you discard the “I”?
Pick your own god(ess) below. Or create your own! Then contemplate on his-her-its qualities. And remember those qualities are just projections of your own self, a figment of your dreaming mind. The projector is inseparable from the projection.
