Freedom

I have described throughout this series the core of Tantric philosophy as an underlying commitment to a single principle. That principle has two functions. On the one hand, it is a principle that underlies everything that exists. And, on the other hand, it creates everything that exists.

If you put these together, you end up with the rather difficult-to-understand idea that this single principle is everything that exists. The entirety of human experience, and the entire universe that human beings experience, is a single thing that unfolds as a single thing from a single principle.

Tantric philosophy is, in large part, an attempt to describe this difficult idea in a myriad of ways. It uses gods and goddesses, complex communal rituals, the discipline of contemplative and meditative practices, reflection on the most mundane elements of ordinary human experience. It uses basically anything that it has to hand, to try to explore this one elemental idea: everything is one thing.

When you cons…