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TANTRA
plines, through many lives. The spiritual emotion of the adept is prema: ecstatic, egoless, beatific bliss in the realization of transcendent identity.
Coming down again from this sublime height of form-annihilating realization to the kingdom of phenomenality, differentiation is seen but there is no estrangement; there is no tendency then to deprecate-for there is no guilt, there has been no Fall. The world does not require to be reformed; nor are its laws to be disregarded. All of the various planes of manifestation of the absolute can be beheld in a dispassionate spirit. The solid, the liquid, and the gascous states of the one substance, under differing conditions, producing differing effects, are accepted without moral or emotional preference. For the whole spectacle of the world, without exception, is generated by the dynamism of Māyā-Sakti, the power of the cosmic dance (līlā) of the dark and terrible, sublime, all-nourishing and -consuming Mother of the World. The beings of the world, and all the ranges of experience, are but waves and strata in a single, ever-flowing, universal stream of life.
Obviously, this is the view that we have already encountered many times in our present examination of the philosophies of India. The hymn from the Taittiriya Brāhmaṇa, celebrating the substance and energy of the world as food," was based on a nondualism of just this kind. The released-reborn celebrates himself as food-and-eater; for though the gross outer sheath of the organism, the "sheath of food" (annamayakośa), is not the whole of the divine manifestation (there being, in the subtle sphere of the several inner sheaths, more subtle formations and incarnations of the Supreme Essence), nevertheless "food is not to be despised." The reality of Brahman was realized in the orthodox Vedic Brahman tradition progressively, under various manifestations: as the life-matter of the material world, in the Hymn of Food; or as the sun, "he who yonder glows," in a multi26 Taittiriya Brahmana 2. 8. 8; cf. supra, pp. 345-347.
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