Publisher's Synopsis
TANTRA: The Secret Power of Sex ... Physical merging, at best, is never more than a mere embracing, with a very limited interpenetration. Mental involvement, however, knows no barrier. In its final form it becomes a total commitment, a complete identification of one personality with another. You must, therefore, ensure that the involvement is always, every time, and in every way, mutual. There must never be any imbalance of commitment. From now on it will be our aim to obliterate your individual selves so that a greater, merged Self will be released. This is a frightening thought to those who do not know Tantric beliefs: the ego is normally something to be clung to with an insane possessiveness. But Tantrists know that to lose your ego is to find it. To lose your limited ego is to find your Greater Ego: time-spanning, creationembracing, self-merging with your Tantric partner. We firmly believe that the future of civilization lies not in an increase of material goods but in a deepening of our awareness of the world. We must learn to look at the world as if it were an integral part of us. As if every leaf that stirs, every animal that whimpers, every person's pain and pleasure, affected us personally. This has been the constant message of all great thinkers, all great religions, and unless we enrich our appreciation of the world we will never advance. The key to the future of mankind is Empathy. It is not Sympathy with a Viet Nam orphan, a wounded animal, a ravaged environment. Sympathy calls for us to consider ourselves as beings apart who can feel sorry for the problems of others, and that is where it is deficient. Its presumption that we stand alone, that we arc self-sufficient, that our Selves must be preserved before all else: it is this basic outlook that has made the world the wretched place that it is today. Empathy, on the other hand, calls for involvement: you do not feel sorry or glad, or pained because another is sorry or glad or in pain; you feel the others sorrow, happiness, pain because it is your sorrow, happiness, pain. You empathize when you see the world through the eyes and the emotions of others. You empathize when you say "How would I feel in that person's place?", "What would be my pain if I was that animal locked in a cage?", "What would be my feelings if I was that stretch of river filled with filth and pollution from a factory?" Such empathy was a normal way of life in ancient India. Animals, plants, rivers, mountains, countries, nations, the very forces of nature, each had their guardian deity, each was personified: an excellent device to promote universal empathy. If you misuse the earth, the Earth Goddess will punish you, if you are unkind to an animal the guardian deity of the beast will strike you. But we have lost this talent for empathy and must, therefore, make an effort to rediscover it. Do not tell us that you cannot put yourself in another's place: people do it all the time. A mother empathizes with her child when she empathizes with its home-sickness even though she knows that she, herself, would not feel such anguish in such circumstances. An animal lover empathizes with a tiger when, he sees it performing acrobatics in a circus: A writer empathizes with a river when he writes movingly about its pollution. The greatest leaders of mankind, all down the ages, have not been the ones with a feeling of sympathy, but those who have had the gift of empathy. And empathy is the ability to dissolve your own ego and expand it to embrace the Self of others. Only by losing your obsession with your limited self can you realize your empathized self which will, eventually, embrace the whole of creation.
