A Trident Of Wisdom

"I have prepared a trident of Wisdom in order to cut asunder their bondage." — Abhinavagupta This is a long commentary on a short Tantra. One of the most authoritative and venerated texts in Kashmir Shaivism, it deals with the nature of Ultimate Reality and with methods of realization focusing on the theory and practice of Mantra. Abhinavagupta presents his metaphysics of language, of the Word (Vak), and its relation to consciousness. He calls it, "trikasastra-rahasya-upadesa: The teaching of the secret of the Trika doctrine."

This book illustrates the extent to which we can understand the writings of the leading tantricas whose views regarding the universe and enlightenment developed from ritual practice and yoga. Contributors to this anthology include Helene Brunner, Gudrun Buhnemann, Richard H. Davis, Vrajavallabha Dviveda, Sanjukta Gupta, Minoru Hara, Paul Muller-Ortega, Navjivan Rastogi, Alexis Sanderson, Jan A. Schoterman, Raffaele Torella, and Teun Goudriaan.

For early civilizations, consciousness and the sense of self were experienced as located in the center of the body, most often near to or within the physical heart. Enlightenment was understood as the illumination of a transformed "spiritual heart." Thus the mind of the body as a whole was represented by the heart-soul. In contrast, modern culture places consciousness within the brain, resulting in a mind/body dualism. This separation of mind and body has recently been emphasized as characteristic of the psychopathologies of the modern self. This volume explores the understanding and experience of consciousness in the earliest civilizations before about 500 BCE. Beginning with a description of ancient Western and Eastern heart-consciousness, the psychological and spiritual manifestations of the ancient mature heart-soul are summarized. Ancestor worship, lineage identity, primitive consciousness and the ways in which the external world was mirrored by the inner world provide additional clues about the experience of heart-consciousness. Finally, the work addresses the fundamental changes in the experience of consciousness that led to the mind/body dualism of today.

To see more manuscripts by Richard Chambers Prescott go to Scribd.com and enter Grascott or PrescottRC. This manuscript, Mortal Grounding, has a simple thought in mind. To bring together our modern cosmological knowledge with our understanding of what is consciousness. It is something of a task to unite these two styles of comprehension about our existence, as much as it is to join quantum physics with general and special relativity. The idea is that both want to reach the source, the source of what is cosmological and what is consciousness. It seems simple enough. Cosmology studies the creation, searching for the creator of it all, whatever that may be. Consciousness seems to look more at what is the creator in order to understand creation. They are parallel and reversed, but both seek to understand, re-link, comprehend or unite with the Mystery. This Universes Given Moment of reaching, of conscious mortal becoming, grounded on Earth, for the brief moment, life to death, yet in and as a rare something more, the rarest star stuff circling back as consciousness that is able to grasp its origin, without a direction transposed as times beginning. This would be one idea of mortal grounding. Some of the subjects taken up in this endeavor of unification are Pure Gravity, Spacetime Fluid, the Superclustering of Universes, Wave Cosmology, Non-Local Independent Consciousness, the question, is this Logical or Mystical. The text also leans heavily on Tantras explanations, examining the myriad layers of consciousness and their psychological weight, the intriguing erotic energy, the hidden secrets that are rarely discussed and the nature of freedom according to the belief system of Tantra.