If one remains on the analytical-philosophical plane, the notion of creating reality through interpretation can only reduce itself, in the passage from concepts to praxis, to an I that, stage-playing, seeks cunningly or crudely to conceal or magnify facts of the past or to plot for a future. In the Tantric condition, instead, reality is modified because one interacts naturally within it, because one is it: the (liberated) mind is Consciousness, the (authentic) reality is Consciousness.
Hermeneutic manipulation aimed at opening perspectives would always and only be the living of an I at the mercy of facts and events of the objective past, just as the alterations of reality generated by perspectives would be events of the present and of the future—always and only portions of objectivity with respect to a subject.
Instead the Tantra say otherwise, and this is Tantric hermeneutics: it is not you who interpret facts or acts; you were not even the one who performed them, in effect. Rather, it is a matter of your I’s irradiated by the ātman, of which all—various I’s and the ātman—the I that now believes itself to be yourself is at times aware, whereas for the most part “you” are such a superior awareness that gathers in itself all the elements just mentioned in their different relations and combinations: the ātman, precisely.
This Tantric vision can certainly be framed as simple pathology of the mind or as creative genius if one judges it according to representation—that is, according to a logical chain that arises from presupposing as intrinsically existent in themselves the I as the totality of the mind, the objectivity of phenomena, and their flowing in time. Psychologies and neurosciences, as well as theoretical philosophies—including the most radical—presuppose these two elements, I and world, as subsisting in themselves within time. What some few others say is that representation is only a self-referential modality that operates by reducing “everything” to its own limits (obliterating those limits into dogmas if need be: that immaterial thoughts arise from encephalic matter violates the nihil est sine ratione, the foundation of all rational certainty), and these few state that there is a modality of effectiveness anterior to representation.
Both points of view—representational and pre-representational, conventional and esoteric—proclaim themselves to be science, that is, empirical and repeatable knowledge, and indeed both sciences are repeatable, each under its own conditions. The difference between the two worlds is rather that ordinary science does not rest on direct experiences but on mediated ones: it is the human biological-cognitive structure that acts as a screen between what is believed objective and what the mind believes (this is precisely the meaning of the Greek sōma sēma, that the body is the tomb of the mind), and modern science naturally believes—as it has always believed—that it knows perfectly the operation of those mechanisms that translate electro-mechanical signals into thoughts, and this properly is nothing other than the actuality of representation. The Sanātana dharma, on the other hand, in every way and from every corner of the world for millennia, maintains that the biological-cognitive structure of representation is not only evidently deceptive in itself, not only a makeshift self-limitation generated by the material context, but also maintains that this self-limitation can be nullified through the direct and immediate experience of those energetic or nervous dimensions that the human biological-cognitive structure generated by representation ignores.
This retrocession from representation is said to be a deviation from what everyone believes to be, and whoever has it cannot know he has it, because if his mind functions in a certain way he cannot suspect that the minds of everyone else function in a different way. Many acclaimed writers, as well as the great philosophers, the great psychoanalysts, and the geniuses of science and calculation, owe their fame precisely to transcribing flashes of prophetic consciousness—that is, to hints of Kuṇḍalī not understood in their nature and therefore accepted supinely as thoughts into which one has stumbled by intuition (the panacea of the poor in spirit), poured into inspirations or into computations more ratione.
Retrocession from representation is an existential way of saying the thing; the Tantric way of saying the same thing is purely practical: Tantra illustrates the direct path to riding the presaged hints for what they are in themselves, that is, rents in the mesh of representation, actual appearing of consciousness-energies, appearance of viveka, the principle of self-installation of the ātman; and on this path, suspended between nothing and the all, unfolding and tearing mental faculties with the sole and unique beacon of the reiteration of experience, one may attain the awareness of the nature of mind.
Tantra is not a titanic path—if by titanic one means forcing mind and body in view of an objective; it is rather the path of assimilation to a telos that discloses itself, the surpassing of ordinary human nature based on the separation between mind and body. The Tantric path appears as a vicious circle (to find oneself outside representation one must find oneself outside representation), just as representation is a vicious circle, as all who deal with it know. The difference is that representation is a vicious circle in itself, whereas the Sanātana dharma is instead a tautology that appears vicious only if one considers it from the point of view of representation—that is, from the illusory structure which precisely constitutes the veil to be torn.
The ātman is the point of view which says that there are no points of view; it is so physically, it is not a thought—this the Tantra say.
The Western man assumes that what he does not know does not exist; certainly this is highly consolatory, but of course it is merely a case of self-referentiality in itself. For Western man it is implicit and ineluctable that there can only be a point of view, and this belief manifests precisely the operation of the structure of the I; and “the view from nowhere” would always be anchored in the I, were it possible, because there would still be a “who sees”, there would be “things to be seen”, and there would be places and spans of time within which to see. This is not a captious analysis, but a showing that if one does not exit representation, one cannot be in emptiness, but remains subjected to the dichotomic categories created by representation itself.
In advanced yoga simply the point of view does not exist, and not because one abstracts oneself from things or sees them from above—for naturally this would still be a point of view, albeit less crude than ordinary ones—but because the ātman is vision that does not need to see; it is vidyā, knowability in itself without there being an I that sees and things to be seen. This is what it means that the ātman is the Brahman. With all of this, it is clear that so long as the yogī is still in the body, he still has—at least at the intermediate level of Tantra—something analogous to a point of view, but this is permeated by the viewings of the ātman, that is, it is not merely seeing-from-above but seeing-through-the-ātman.
The ātman, insofar as it makes representation fall away—that is, insofar as it makes the yogī recognize himself as the Self (ātman)—creates reality, and this replaces the point of view with the “viewing”, one may put it thus. Evidently this sounds self-contradictory; whoever believes that what is given as self-contradictory does not exist or is at most autosuggestion is rational in so believing (petitio principii is not irrational; rather, they concern a self-referential content that signifies nothing effective except a duplication of words).
The I cannot render itself spontaneous; if the I is the I, by definition it cannot exit itself; it is not even able to think of wanting to do so, because the I is its thoughts, and thoughts cannot be non-thoughts—it is a simple corollary of the principle of non-contradiction, which is the foundation the I recognizes as the guarantee of itself: if you believe yourself to be the I, you are the I; to “be That”, you must “be That”; so long as one believes oneself to think it, it is precisely the I that thinks it—that is, you are not “That”, but are the I.
At the intermediate level of Tantra, creating reality with the mind does not mean either bringing-into-being-from-nothing nor psychologically disposing, therefore. These two categories—respectively purely materialistic and purely intentionalistic—are excluded, indeed a priori, by the very requisites of access to Tantra: if there are no entities that subsist independently, and if the I does not exist, it is obvious that creating reality with the mind cannot mean that an I manipulates things or the thoughts of others. This is—once again—the prejudicial condition that the yogīn lay down: so long as the mind believes itself to be the I, it will see and touch objects and will be able to manipulate them, yes, and will be able to influence the psyche of others, but only through the limbs of the body and through its own egoic thoughts, not otherwise.
In other words, Tantric “creating with the mind” cannot be thought by the mind that represents, still less by the computational mind; it is possible, certainly, that it be a fantasy (that is, merely idealizing, thinking, living in parallel worlds, or believing oneself a god), but the plastically adamantine level of the intellect of the Ṛṣi, yogīn, Kabbalists, adepts, alchemists, and natural philosophers who have for millennia repeated the same identical and incomprehensible images is a disconcerting objective datum.
Creating with the mind at the intermediate level of Tantra can be rendered, in Western terms, as a creative “hermeneutics”—provided one keeps in mind that the existentive conditions within which it operates precede the dichotomies of the representational mind, that is, the divisions of reality into subject and object, locality and temporal partitions.
The exposition in contemporary Western terms of the condition of awareness of which the Tantra speak—and schematized in saying that the ātman is the ātman plus an I—is then, one may say, a Tantric psychoanalysis.
And at the same time this awareness coincides in part with the awareness of the whole (where the genitive is subjective rather than objective), and this would be a Tantric physics.
From a metaphysical point of view, therefore, one may say that the yogī is simultaneously the subject, the object, and the interpretation or the knowledge.
And from the practical perspective, the yogī naturally—(the sentence is complete like this, as the Tristan Akkord).
Thus the Tantra say: what has been described above in terms that appear hallucinatory is, according to the revealed texts, nothing other than the principial nature of mind, and it is the simplest and most spontaneous thing there is—so natural that thinking it already irreparably distorts it; that it is described in convoluted and complex terms is because each word must remove one by one the countless obstacles that representation has created and imposes.
In this Tantric condition there is no time; or rather, time exists—so long as one is in the body, one is always also an I—but the categories of past, present, and future do not exist. Now, it is not possible to demonstrate the nonexistence of something that does not exist; representational thought asserts as evidence that certain categories exist, but in Tantric living they do not. If the originating evidences are different (even though it must be repeated that the Tantric one is not properly an “evidence”, since the very notion of evidence is the product of representation), then every objection one wishes to raise against an evidence must proceed from that evidence, not from another; thus the assertion of the inexistence of temporal partitions must proceed within Tantric “logic”, for to annihilate a system contained within a system, one must first perforate or remove the system that contains it, just as one cannot refute quantum mechanics on the basis of history or botany—and this Socrates already notes in the Euthyphro, the first Platonic dialogue: one must answer a question within its own borders.
Now, the Tantra do not operate according to the schemes just described; they do not speak in terms assimilable to hermeneutics, psychology, physics, metaphysics, praxis, or temporality: the analytic exposition of the Tantra is a forcible reduction of a whole into arbitrary watertight forms.
The Western world begins with Homer, who in the first book of the Iliad predetermines its destiny: of Calchas the seer it is said that he knows the things that are (ta eonta), the things that will be (ta essomena), and the things that were (ta pro’eonta). It is also possible that Homer in certain respects sings of an age antecedent to the current Kālī Yuga, but it happened that those who wished to reduce reality to their own thoughts remained subjected precisely to the intrinsic materiality of these words.
In the condition “outside the three times”, instead, past and present and future are coexistent in the pre-representational mind, which creates them and modifies them in phenomenal reality.
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