The Source of Life
The first and foremost principle of Tantra is that the source of the life energies that we all experience are within each of us as the center, or heart of our conscious, aware beings. The nature of this source is both elusive and mysterious. It is the center of each of our beings and yet is what connects us all as it is a shared center of beingness.
This life energy is called Chi in the Chinese, Ki in Japan, Ka in Egypt, Prana in India, and the Greeks, understanding the sensual nature of this force, called it Eros. Our Western society has no word for it, in fact if asked what the elements of the universe are, many would answer, "Earth, air, fire, and water". This ignorance of the energy that supports all life forms is hard to understand. Ignoring energy as one one of the elements of our universe, even with no regard for life energy (which may be a unique form of energy), is even harder to understand.
Both the movie "The Fifth Element" and the growing popularity of Reiki and Chi studies, indicate that this ignorance is beginning to diminish. Many of the Chi studies, like Chi Gong, and Tai Chi, are individual and personal, while the Japanese form, Reiki can be practiced as a mutual and intimate activity.
The universal life force animates all living beings, all sentient life. This force proceeds from the conceptual void, the empty space between the subatomic particles that compose all matter. This space or void is called the Tao in the Chinese tradition, the West has no suitable name for it. Gravity comes close, it has been called "the field" or the "zero point field" as well. This void has also been called pure consciousness by some that claim that every object and being that exists in the material world is a manifestation of that consciousness. This concept is the basis of the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, a school of thought that closely parallels quantum physics.
Our life and affairs revolve around the particles in our world, the empty space is often ignored. We do not often think of the silence that enables the tones, tempo, and harmony of music, nor the physical space that enables material objects to exist.
Most of the universe is space. When you look up into the sky at night the bright points of light and the planets and moons that surround them occupy an infinitesimal portion of the universe. Using as an example a single hydrogen atom, if the proton was enlarged to the size of a pea, the one electron revolving around that proton would be three football field lengths away.
Though most atoms are much more dense than hydrogen, the objects you see in your world are also mostly space. The reason you see them as "solid" is that you see the particles in perhaps 3,000,000 places "at once". The processing time of our sensory and mental systems are so slow that the material world seems solid and stable, when in fact it is quite fluid and constantly in motion.
If our thought and sensory processes could be speeded up millions of times, our world would look far less solid. It would appear to be the fluid, ever changing realm of possibility that it actually is. As the quantum physicists perceive it, "infinite possibility collapses into actuality in the present moment".
The source of life energy, as all energy, is the void. The void is a difficult concept to define or understand. One way is to think of a distant location, such as a country on the other side of the world. In order to travel to this location in a traditional manner requires the concepts of space in the distance between you and your goal, and time in the durational aspects of crossing that distance.
If you were to be able to enter into the void, however, you could re-enter the distant location immediately. Perhaps this is the way Scottie used to beam people up and down in the Star Trek episodes. But you can get the idea that within the void there is nothing, not even time and space, no distance and duration. In this way the source can be both the center of our beingness and the center of all beingness at the same time.
To bring this concept closer to our experience in daily life, the source of life energies being within each of us affords us more responsibility, more personal power, and much more freedom than we recognize when we ignore this source.
Our society does not have a suitable word for the life energies nor their source, we have externalized the source and called it god. We then define this god and create a mental image of the form and realm in which god exists. In the Tantric understanding, this is the nature and manifestation of what the Bible terms idolatry. The greatest Tantric master of all time may have been Jesus himself, he claimed to be the son of god (the Earthly manifestation of that source), and tried to convince us that the kingdom of heaven was within us and only expressed into the world when we manifest the purity of those human life energies.
The nature of the pure manifestation of the human life energy is compassionate, peaceful, intelligent, and creative. It is only when the mind is split form the body in conditioned awareness that it becomes threatened, aggressive, vulnerable and violent. The ills of our society can be healed if and when this split mind is healed and people start to manifest this essential life energy.
