Joy is prayer--joy is strength--joy is love. --Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Bliss of Identity
All nature is taught in radiant ways to move
All beings are in myself embraced
O fiery boundless heart of joy and love,
How are you beating in a mortal's breast!
It is your rapture flaming through my nerves
and my cells and atoms thrill with You;
My body your vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Your ecstasy.
I am a center of your golden light
And I its vast and vague circumference;
You are my soul great, luminous and white
And Yours, my mind and will, and glowing sense.
Your spirit's infinite breath I feel in me;
My life is a throb of your eternity.
--Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems
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The Idea of Tantra
When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the god you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art is really worship.
--Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living
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Does God Exist?
Perceptible and yet not perceptible; invisible and yet powerful, real like the energy--charged air, wind, storm, as important for life as the air we breathe: this is how in ancient times people imagined the Spirit, and God's "invisible" workings... Spirit as understood in the Bible, means--as opposed to flesh, the force or power moving from God. An "invisible" force that is effective, powerful, creative, or destructive for life in judgement, in creation, in history, in Israel and later in the [Christian] Church. It comes upon one powerfully or gently, stirring up love, ecstasy, often producing extraordinary phenomenon, active in great minds of courage, of Moses, warriors, singers, prophets and prophetesses.
The Spirit is not--as the word itself might suggest--the spirit of mankind. This is the Spirit of God, who in the [oneness] Holy Spirit is the light of all creation and the world. He is not any sort of magic, supernatural aura, or magical being of an animistic kind. The Spirit is the One, the God himself. He is God close to mankind and the world... comprehending, bestowing, but not bestowable, free, not controllable; he is life giving love, power and force. A wind blowing through all of Creation by divine will, but not by any force."
He comes where he is willed and stays afar from where he is not, in a sort of Divine wisdom, the Spirit waits to be called.
--Hans Kung, Does God Exist?
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