Re: Sri Yantra

It must have been 10 years ago that I was studying yoga and trying to understand tantric philosophy. Basically, everything is relative and reality is an illusion. We are attached, in time, to the present and the present is all that is. The future is unknown and the past is a projection of the present. We ride on the seed of creation.

Here is a paraphrase of how Philip Rawson explains it in the book "Tantra, the Indian Cult of Ecstasy":

The past is a trail of things and events which is being projected from the mouth of the present, like the flames from the tail-vent of a rocket (or mouth of a monster) ... Each person's 'present-frame' is itself a mouth of that monster vomiting out his world of experience and knowledge. We will never be able to find the origin or causes of all things "out there", among older projected things. Their origin is the projection-mechanism itself within the psycho-physical oragnism. What is being projected is ... reality. We have to 'turn around' and look back up into the place from which experienced reality is coming. And, having done it, we have to go on living, fully aware of what is really going on ... the continuing act of creation ...

Then he says: "This backward look into the mouth which spews out time and space is represented in the great Tantrik yantra-diagrams, especially the Shri Yantra. The act of meditating on them is meant to drive the mind to take that backward look, in fact to reverse the act of Genesis, and stare straight into the continuing act of Creation. All the Tantrik practices and art revolve around this process. The key word in Sanskrit is 'Paravritti', which means 'turning back up'. And the attitude of devotion or reverence, which expresses itself in the ritual of offerings and worship to symbolic images, is, at bottom, a way of keeping this possibility continuously in mind."

Me: All religions use sacred geometries and the sacred geometries bring in energies or emotions that people experience unconsciously. If you are conscious of them, it kind of takes the magic away because you know what is going on (kind of like the "observer effect" in quantum mechanics where the act of making an observation changes the experiment you are trying to carry out.)

From Sacred Geometry by Robert Lawlor:

"Functioning then at the archetypal level, Geometry and Number describe fundamental causal energies in their interwoven, eternal dance. It is this way of seeing that stands behind the expression of cosmological systems as geometric configurations. For example, the most revered of all Tantric diagrams, the Sri Yantra, images all the necessary functions active in the universe through its nine interlocked triangles. To immerse oneself in such a geometric diagram is to enter into a kind of philosophic contemplation."