If you want a mirror, Look at this moment - respectfully. When you have learned to experience, not to try to hold on to events, thoughts and emotions, but to let them come and go with their own force. . . .

When you have learned to be detached, to perceive the automatic processes in your mind, the habits in your life style and in your thoughts and emotions, and when you can accept what you experience without feeling guilty and without suppressing what you experience. . . .

When you have taught yourself to be naked, not to clothe yourself in ideals or cravings for being holy, good and just, then it will all become much easier, both for you and for us.
. . . Then you will discover real repose, fullness of energy and fruitfulness, and you will experience yourself, your own self.

Jnana Yoga is pointing in that direction.

In Tantra there are two ways of reaching the identity of awareness behind your acting and participating person, two seemingly contradictory attitudes.
One says: I am not this, I am what I am experiencing. I am not my body, thoughts, judgements, opinions, knowledge, emotions, name, mind, will - I am this consciousness at rest in itself. This is used for example in ‘Inner Silence’. The other way says: I am all this. I am part of everything and everything is part of me. All that I experience, I am wholly and fully - now. And if someone says that I am such and such, I say, Yes, I am that too. I am all that, everything that happens within me and outside me.

This Tantric method does not dodge anything. If you feel ambition, you realize it, and exhaust it in your Karma Yoga; or you give it a symbolic name, which you become one with in your meditation; Durga is used in India, for example, as an expression for the force behind actions. If it is the most profound anxiety, the very worst blackness, then you become one with it, if you can see it; otherwise give it a symbolic form, for example that of the terrifying Kali, with which you then identify. Whatever you experience, accept it, become one with it, thus it is changed into inner security. You become the one you are, you become pure, you become yourself.

Different cultures may have different symbols, but the essence is the same. You should just find a symbol or a form that lets you experience reality and its underlying force - does it enchant you or are you there yourself?

“I am not the thoughts, the events. I am the experienced or ‘I am all this’ are two formulas whose philosophical or other meaning is of no significance. It is not the interpretation which is important, but that they trigger a process in your mind which makes it possible for you to experience yourself.

consciousness, contradictory attitudes, durga, emotions, fruitfulness, inner silence, karma yoga, meditation, tantra, two ways