The new age is fond of embracing some sort of mediocre perfection and proclaiming it to be the highest law if tantrism or tribalism or some such thing. We are all perfect just the way we are. Accept your faults your pain and your suffering because it’s all part of a perfectly balanced world.

Regardless of how you look at it there is some truth to this banality. But if you look deeper into the Tantric worldview, you will find it quite unlikely that these new agers have any idea about perfection.

It’s generally thought that if you can clearly recognize the perfection in everything then there is nothing else. How can there be any suffering to recognize and accept if true perfection is all that is perceived?

The reason, they say, that we cannot recognize the true perfection of the universe is because we are caught up in our petty desires and the relativity of time and space, we are restricted by our sense from witnessing the depth and expansiveness of cause and effect. We are limited in so many ways!

But yet have such potential for expansiveness: infinite big bangs just waiting to take place in each of us. The ways to unlock that expansiveness and the expression of that expansiveness are also infinite: entirely individual. None-the-less, many sages have done their best to express the path in words; many techniques have been left for us to follow. We can breath like this or like that, sit this way or that, put our focus here and there, we can sing and dance, or read a book, or just do nothing at all. But whatever it is you’re doing or not doing, you must do with devotion and awareness of your relationship to the objects of your senses, the objects of your thought, objects of enjoyment and such. And then smash all such objects and enjoy the higher perfection of being immersed in yoga (in union).

I wish you all some perception of true perfection in the new year!

Om namah shivaya