Brian Hewlett, social scientist and edutainer

The last week has brought an incredible experience that has contributed greatly to my transformation and to affirming my understanding of true love and the tantric experience.

On the 27th of April, I witnessed a transmission/teaching by Guru Sri Kumaré at a Sound Garden Healing Workshop offered by my friend Darrell Hicks. After a wonderful guided meditation he led us through, I opened my eyes and, to my amazement, I had a distinct vision of Shiva in all his/her glory. Shiva is one of the most complex gods of India, embodying seemingly contradictory qualities as the destroyer and the restorer, the great ascetic and the symbol of sensuality, the benevolent herdsman of souls and the wrathful avenger. Shiva is also known as the Sacred Androgynous One who takes the form of Ardhanari, the apparent synthesis of male (animus) and female (anima).

Upon revealing this vision to Sri Kumaré he offered me a Puja ceremony that he has only offered two others who saw Shiva in him. He expressed that this was a special power of individuals to see the Gods in others and when Shiva is seen, it usually is associated with transcending form. This was extremely powerful to me since I have been constantly struggling with form and the balance of transcending it while honoring it in developing my understanding of love as a concept that transcends all form allowing us to express our true divine nature in anyway to anyone.

I graciously accepted the invitation to perform this ceremony, which is essentially a ritual suggestive of symbolic offering of ourselves, our thoughts, our desires, actions, and things we own to God as a mark of devotion and surrender to enjoy whatever comes to us as a gift from the divine. In the Hindu culture, Pujas, which consist of vocal repititon and mental recitations of the names of God, is one of the most popular and highest forms of devotion.

During the required 5-day ritual I released a number of my attachments to the pain I continuously held on to related to the judgement of my sexuality and other parts of my being as a child. This release led to a transformation that helped me realize I had stripped my sexuality and physical being of divinity and light and only attributed darkness to it while I attributed light and no darkness to my spiritual transcendent being. At the root of this transformation was the confirmation that illusion and truth, the light and the darkness, and feminine and masculine energies are in all things. In the culture of Hinduism, this is the power of the god Shiva and the goddess Shakti, which are inseperable, to bring us to that space of sacred androgyny or divine union of all within that allows us to express our true divine nature with another.

This transformation also confirmed my understanding of true love being a state that is beyond physical form; a state of Tantra, the purest love. In order to truly be in love we must be free from the desire to possess forms, those or ourselves and those of others. Love is freedom to be who we are, with whomever we are, whenever we are. It is also the ability to see that same freedom in any form we are observing or sharing our experience with at any given moment. This is a philosophy that we all can use in every aspect of life as noted by John Friend, Anusara Yoga Guru in the video above.

Thank you Sri Kumaré, Lord Shiva, and Shakti for such a wonderful gift of transformation and love; a gift of understanding that was confirmed even further upon my being led to the following excerpt of “The Search” by Osho, one of the great masters or yoga, that clarifies why Tantra is the highest form of love, the science of love, and the yoga of love only minutes before I sat to write this blog:

http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Osho/osho/osho_on_love_in_tantra.htm