Pérdidas en los álabes

WHERE DO LOVE and romance come into the picture?

Let's ask ourselves what romance does to us that we yearn so for it. And what is it we feel when we are in love that is so important?

In love, we are overcome with awareness of the beloved person: in everything we do, we think of him or her. And "think" isn't the right word - for it is rather that we are completely occupied with feelings for the beloved person, and we want to bring those feelings into our every moment of awareness.

When we are in love, we glow! We're more alive, and we know it and other people know it. We love love, and we adore lovers.

Romance is a kind of ritual which recognizes the special awareness that comes with being in love -which expresses that awareness and extends into behavioral patterns that anthropologists call "courtship rites." We bring our beloved flowers and other gifts;

we clean and arrange our apartments to prepare for him or her; we dress with care and awareness of the

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attractive powers of our costume; we arrange special foods and entertainment; and so on. In short, we create an environment that favors love, and has a direction to it that should - after a while - lead to the consummation of that love.

Now that we've read this book, we should also perceive that through this ritual of romance we are building erotic tension and actually acting in a way which, in a religious situation, is described as "worship." When we are in love, we truly do worship our beloved, and in that person we are finding the highest expression of Life as we can know it. We want to be with our beloved all the time, and we can per-ceive no greater joy than union with her or him.

Remember what it is like to be in love, and realize that it is the Life Force at its fullest seeking fulfillment. It is the biology of reproduction programming the behavior of two people to carry out not merely "the physical act of sex" but to accomplish it with the total focus of all psychic and spiritual energies of two people to enable the incarnation of a third person whose destiny is intertwined with theirs.

It's the God and Goddess within, worshiping each other, and uniting to produce a new physical body perfectly suited to the incarnating soul. What higher act of magick do we normally experience than this?

In Tantra we re-capture that union of God and God-dess, and we do it with awareness of the Deity within each and the other. Perhaps some of us are older, and the first flush of first love has long since departed. Can "philosophic appreciation" of the Tantric view of life raise the richness of body and psychic heat we experienced in our first love?

It cannot, unless we add to it the elements found in Romance and the rites of courtship. Much of Tantra can be seen in the externals of ritual - rituals which combine sym-bolism meaningful to the culture of the participants with actions that produce the natural build-up of energies we've just described.

Romance, like Magick, involves the creation of a special

Afterword /121 environment, an atmosphere, and ritual actions focus the inner awareness, to arouse the Divine Life Force within.

In the "Tantric Weekend" that follows, you will see an example of this. It is not a ritual that must be followed to the letter, but is offered only as an example or as a framework around which you may compose your own. The point to remember is that you are preparing a drama in which you are acting out the deepest and most powerful programming of your entire genetic system, and you are giving it a new focus: creating a Magical Child that is your own spiritual growth, or that may be anything else you magically desire.

You may better appreciate it as worship. Give it all the attention that you would, knowing you are preparing a place for God and Goddess.

Your Temple, your Priestly Robes, your Sacraments, and your Ritual Adorations are all focused on the glory of the Goddess and the God - the Divine Manifestation of Feminine and Masculine Life Force, the Yin/Yang of Creation. You can bring into play your perception of these Forces as they seek expression in your consciousness as various powerful Archetypes; you can dress yourselves in dramatic "assumption" of these God- or Goddess-images;

you can - if you dare - arouse the deepest roots of your sexual drives with the use of fetish and fantasy.

Always prolong the "foreplay" - the build-up. The

"Tantric Weekend" states that your goal is to raise the Life Force within to fever pitch and still keep it in bounds, use it to increase your awareness and perception. Add richness to your appreciation of your partner with the perception that he/she is "God and Goddess alive" at the same time that he/she is "soul sharing your life."

Love and Lust are both four letter words. Together they add up to eight letters, like the word "Marriage."

That's what our ritual is accomplishing: marriage is a true union (having little to do with the legal institution by the same name) of Male and Female. We can limit our conception

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of that to the union of Man and Woman, or extend it to that of the most dynamic powers in the Universe. In Tantra, we know that we are Divine, and in our union the Creative Forces are raised and can bring into manifestation our Magical Child.

A Tantric