Standing in the river, among a variegated and contemplative crowd, gathering water in my two cupped palms, I offer it the rising sun and let it slip through my fingers. And so the water returns to Ganga which I perceive in her totality, as a process. Ganga, beyond the here and now, beyond the ghats and the crowd, melts into the immensity of time and space. Ganga is a moving, changing unit: upstream, at its source, way up in the icy Himalayas from which it springs, thousands of miles away, and d o w n s t r e a m at its m o u t h , in Calcutta, where Ganga and the ocean unite. The ocean of its origins where water evap-orates, becomes a cloud, snow or a monsoon downpour, to feed some other river before coming back to her, ceaselessly, in an eternal cycle.
Ganga is both here and now, yesterday and tomorrow: her banks have witnessed the birth and death of countless generations. And on her banks, Ganga saw the very first villages, the first settlers; Ganga pro-vided water indiscriminately to the horses of all of the invaders: the A r y a n b a r b a r i a n s , t h e c r u e l M o g h u l s , t h e British a n d o t h e r s . Conquerors may come and go but Mother Ganga remains and she shall always be there, eternal, always the same and never identical:
you never swim twice in the same river, as the ancient Greeks used to say. Majestic and serene, nobody, nothing can stop her languid flow.
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Well, so much for Ganga, but the same applies to any object, to any being. Each person is a river, from conception to death and yet, we are just a mere drop, a fleeting instant in the immense human river of today, yesterday and tomorrow. But we carry within ourselves the entire cosmos, for "there is nothing in the universe which is not in the human body... what is here, is there and what is not here is nowhere"
states the Visvasara Tantra. Moreover "In the body there are the Supreme Siva-Sakti who pervade all things. In the body is Prakrti-Sakti and all Her products. In fact, the body is a vast magazine of Power (Sakti). The object of the Tantrik rituals is to raise these various forms of power to their full expression." (Woodroffe, The Serpent Power, Madras, 1965, p. 50).
Everything is alive;
what we call "death"
is an abstraction.
- David Bohm As early as the tender age of 10, I already had an inkling of what death was because of a friend of the family, a science teacher. For the kid I was, he had all the allure and prestige of a scientist. He was an enthusiastic entomologist, doubled as a geologist and his hobbies were paleontology and prehistory, and in those capacities he would tirelessly comb the entire region. He had discovered, among other things, in a wooded dale near a rivulet, a so-called "neolithic work-shop" where he had dug up dozens of carved stone tools.
Since he was our neighbor, I used to visit him quite often and I believe my inquisitiveness amused him. He had gradually built up his own little private museum which fascinated me, especially his butter-fly collection of all shapes, colors and sizes, pinned in well-ordered frames. The greatest thrill for me was when he obligingly opened his special showcase, the one I called his treasure chest which contained all the stone tools as well as three human skulls. One day, he removed one of those anonymous skulls from the showcase and knocking on his or her forehead, told me: "You know, somebody used to live and think in there..." All of a sudden those old bones took on a strange human dimension and I mused that some day, some stranger might hold my own skull and say: "Somebody used to live and think inside that skull..." Without really frightening me it did make me think and that is probably why I later bought a skull-shaped paperweight that used to adorn my desk as a student. It's one of the few objects of that period that I still have today; it has now acquired a certain sheen and generations of uninhibited flies have studded it with little black dots.
Ever since - naturally this has nothing to do with Tantra of which I was obviously totally unaware at the time - the mystery of death has been a subject of thought for me, reinforced by the war which, like
68 The Tantric Outlook
millions of other men, put me face to face with death many a time and in very concrete terms indeed.
On a lighter note and in order to introduce and support the title of this chapter, here is the story of two friends who have just met. One of them says: "Do you know that so-and-so died?" And the other one, shrugging his shoulders, answered: "Well, ole buddy, what do you expect, that's life..." Right! For Tantra, death is a vital topic which underlies our entire world view. A follower of Tantra lives not with the obsession of, but in constant intimacy with, death. In the West death means the end or absence of life, whereas for Tantra it is the oppo-site of birth.
These few w o r d s express the h u g e g a p b e t w e e n Eastern and Western thinking about death and until quite recently the subject was almost as taboo as sex. Moreover in India, death is linked to reincarna-tion, a complex subject that I will not evoke here. I shall restrict myself to shedding light on the mystery of death from the point of view of Tantra, in order to grasp its deeper meaning.
Paradoxically, Tantra is first and foremost the cult of life in its myri-ad forms; it embraces all the implications of the above, joy and pain, life's constraints. Life must be experienced in its myriad forms, from its humblest aspects to its most sublime. Tantra realizes that life can neither be truly understood nor enjoyed if death has not first been conquered. Conquering death is not tantamount to denying its exis-tence or not wanting to come face to face with it or wishing not to be subjected to it - that's obviously impossible. The point is to take the sting out of death.
At the root of all suffering, of all fear, lies death, either one's own or that of one's loved ones. I remember being greatly troubled as a child when I realized for the first time that my mother was a mere mortal and I could not bear the idea that some day she would no longer be here. Her first gray hair caused me great sadness because it meant that she was also subjected to the process of aging and I could accept nei-ther her aging nor her dying. In order to make me feel better she yanked that first gray hair out.
Do we not sometimes think that if it were not for disease and death life would be wonderful? But how true is this, really?
First of all, dying is something that happens to other people: when my time comes, I will no longer be there to talk about it! And second-ly, only the individual fears death, for it means his or her disappear-ing, whereas for the species as a whole, it is an indispensable blessing.
Religions may console us, reassure us, as they tell us of eternal life after death or perhaps reincarnation. Right or wrong? Who knows? To each his/her own opinion and that is why this chapter will be restrict-ed to the biological field alone.