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WHO SEEKS NIRVANA
The masks are dreamlike. Dreamlike also are the carnival events. Indeed, the world of sleep into which we descend every night, when the tensions of consciousness are relaxed, is precisely that from which the demons, elves, divine and devilish figures of the world mythologies have all bcen derived. All the gods dwell within us, willing to support us, and capable of supporting us, but they require the submission of consciousness, an abdication of sovereignty on the part of our conscious wills. In so far, however, as the little ego regards its own plans as the best, it resists rigorously the forces of its divine substratum. The gods thereupon become dangerous for it, and the individual becomes his own hell. The ancient peoples made peace with the excluded forces by holding them in worship and allowing them their daemonic carnival-even while cultivating, simultaneously, under the forms of sacrifices to the higher gods, a fruitful relaLionship with the forces implicated in the social system. And by this means they won the permission, so to speak, of their own unconscious to continue in the conventional conscious attitude of profitable virtue.
But the Tântric sādhaka is not interested in conventional survival so much as in the fathoming of life and the discovering of its timeless secret. llence the makeshift of carnival is not cnough; for this only supports the general illusion. His goal is to incorporate the excluded forces as well as those accepted generally, and experience by this means the essential nonexistcnce of the antagonistic polarity-its vanishing away, its nirvāņa; i.e., the intrinsic purity and innocence of the scemingly dark and dangerous sphere. In this way he breaks within himself the tension of the “forbidden," and resolves everything in light; recognizing in everything the one Sakti which is the general support of the world, macrocosmic as well as microcosinic, the mother of the gods and elves, the weaver of the moon-dream of history. Therewith comes relcase from the world-illusion--release through its full enjoyment or rcalization.
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