James Fowlers Stages of Faith Tantra Song

Sacrifice What can one say about sacrifice when its very essence is marked by a speechless abyss? Despite its disappearances, decoys, and traumatic reenactments, one, in sincerity, intuits that sacrifice, far more than the cost of gold or the price of blood, is loves first tongue...

Ritual And when this tongue is blessed by the kiss of time, it begins to weave the patterns of its people in a story telling as alive as the rhythms of their mortal coil, their mutual hearth, and the children of their longing like landscapes carved by the elements of desire and the desire of the elements...

Initiation In this weave are born those whose fates and destinies are written only to be unraveled and unraveled only to be reclaimed. Like stars in the sky, our mind-spun constellations extend beyond our knowledge to cradle the unknown and to record its first steps. Beyond the brilliance of the senses, we store the radiance that lights the dark, and this dark gives rise to the burning of generations & spiraling path of souls...

Transmission It is as much a crucible as it is a caress this transmission that clouds the air and colors the earth. We breathe in; we breathe out. What is at stake is not faith, but mercy, not pity, but warmth, not loss, but fables-told & gems of old. In the care of a great teacher, our worn out feeling begins to grow wings and our imagination, perception, and hopeful vision take, at last, joyful flight...

Intuition In this sense, intuition is not simply the sensibility with its conventional connotations of fantasy, child-like perception, and dream interpretation; rather, this faculty and gift of intuition is ancient, even primordial, and yet, simultaneously, current, modern, and embodied. Intuition, as the culmination of a journey of faith, strikes me as a homecoming and a pure experience of becoming. When the intuition is balanced and awakened, one has the ability and virtue to be able to listen to all the voices of creation and to hear their divergence, oneness, and harmony. Furthermore, one recognizes the oneness and the divergence as rooted in one another. Intuition is nonduality that recognizes duality as its partner in play. At this frequency of consciousness, traditional morality is transformed into compassion, and politics is transformed into an environmental perspective in which the human emerges as guardian and ward rather than an alienated species at war with itself...

By Sofiya Hyder